Tracking Review Comments

[Jeff Hanvey <jewahe -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

Good Morning all!

I finished my first training manual, and it is going
out for review this morning. 

It's a strange situation: The manual was supposed to
be published 6 months ago (or even earlier), but the
last tech writer left before beginning the book. I
came aboard last month to complete it. 

Because the department's director is in danger of
losing his job if the policies are not written down
and given to out managers in the field, he decided to
use the review as a "preliminary" publication. Now he
can say that the managers have seen the correct
policies and can start enforcing them.

However, now I am now going to have to deal with
consolodating over 60 people's comments.

I am not really all that concerned about grammatical
and structural changes: those will be fairly
straightforward. At most, I expect these types of
comments to be directed toward clarity.

I am concerned about comments on particular policies.
There will most like be a lot of contradictory
suggestion made. I would like to track these comments
so that I can discuss them with the SME's and work out
the exact policy with them.

I am considering building a spreadsheet. That way, I
can meet with the SME's one time - after the deadline,
and this spreadsheet will (hopefully) shorten the
meeting tremendously (the SME's just love meetings,
and will sit in an all day discussing absolutely
nothing <g>).

Has anyone had experience with this situation? How did
you track such comments? 

=====
Jeff Hanvey
Memphis, TN

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