{"id":13423,"date":"2010-07-15T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-07-15T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2010\/07\/15\/theres-always-the-low-tech-way-of-managing-a-process-too\/"},"modified":"2010-07-15T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-07-15T07:00:00","slug":"theres-always-the-low-tech-way-of-managing-a-process-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20100715-00\/?p=13423","title":{"rendered":"There&#039;s always the low-tech way of managing a process, too"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of my colleagues had a problem with content management. I&#8217;ve changed the underlying scenario but the principle is the same.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"q\"><p> Is there a way to require that someone other than the author of a proposal sign off before the proposal tracking system accepts it? We had an issue where somebody wrote up a proposal, and due to a miscommunication, the proposal coordinator thought the proposal was ready and submitted it prematurely. This happened to another team in our group, and we want to make sure we don&#8217;t make the same mistake. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p> Another colleague explained:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"m\"><p> This is a people problem, not a technology problem. One way to work around it is to tell the proposal coordinator, &#8220;Don&#8217;t submit the proposal until I sent you email that says it&#8217;s okay to submit the proposal.&#8221; <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p> I agree that this was a people problem, but the offered solution suffers from the same miscommunication problem as the original. The proposal coordinator might ask, &#8220;Is the proposal ready?&#8221; and the author responds, &#8220;It&#8217;ll be ready tomorrow.&#8221; The next morning, the proposal coordinator submits the proposal assuming that the author&#8217;s response meant &#8220;Submit it tomorrow,&#8221; when the author actually meant &#8220;You will get an email message from me tomorrow when it&#8217;s ready.&#8221;\n My colleague responded that the technique still has a single point of failure: An error by one person (the proposal coordinator or the proposal author&mdash;you decide who is at fault) results in the proposal to be submitted prematurely. We want to make sure two people sign off on the proposal before it is submitted.\n I proposed a method popularized by Henry Ford: The assembly line.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"m\">\n<ul>\n<li>Author writes proposal. Places proposal in Location&nbsp;1. <\/li>\n<li>Proposal is reviewed by reviewer&nbsp;A.     When it passes review, it is moved to Location&nbsp;2. <\/li>\n<li>Proposal is reviewed by reviewer&nbsp;B.     When it passes review, it is moved to Location&nbsp;3. <\/li>\n<li>Proposal coordinator picks up proposals from Location&nbsp;3     and submits them. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>  With this scheme, every proposal must be approved by both reviewer&nbsp;A and reviewer&nbsp;B. If reviewer&nbsp;A fails to approve the proposal, then it remains in location&nbsp;1. If reviewer&nbsp;B fails to approve the proposal, then it remains in location&nbsp;2. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p> This is another one of those <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2005\/12\/05\/500072.aspx\"> simple low-tech solutions<\/a>: Instead of putting all proposals (complete and incomplete) in one location, the location of the proposal represents its approval state.<\/p>\n<p> Of course, you can add more bells and whistles to this technique. For example, you can allow reviews in parallel by having Location&nbsp;1 mean &#8220;unapproved&#8221;, Location&nbsp;2a mean &#8220;approved by reviewer&nbsp;A only&#8221;, Location&nbsp;2b mean &#8220;approved by reviewer&nbsp;B only&#8221;, and Location&nbsp;3 mean &#8220;approved by both reviewers.&#8221; I&#8217;m sure you can come up with other tweaks. (I&#8217;m assuming that the proposal file format doesn&#8217;t support custom fields like &#8220;signed off by&#8221;.) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of my colleagues had a problem with content management. I&#8217;ve changed the underlying scenario but the principle is the same. Is there a way to require that someone other than the author of a proposal sign off before the proposal tracking system accepts it? We had an issue where somebody wrote up a proposal, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-13423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>One of my colleagues had a problem with content management. I&#8217;ve changed the underlying scenario but the principle is the same. Is there a way to require that someone other than the author of a proposal sign off before the proposal tracking system accepts it? We had an issue where somebody wrote up a proposal, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13423"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13423\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}