Document Check-in/Checkout > Draft Documents > Draft Documents Usage Example

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Scenario

John and Alan work in the operations department of a large life insurance company. They have been assigned the task of updating the Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) to reflect certain process changes approved by the company’s senior vice-presidents. They have the SOP document (Version 2) on Globodox. They need to make some changes to sections of the document. John and Alan will work on the document and publish it as Version 3 as soon as possible. But their respective reporting managers need to review the changes they make in the document, before it is published. If the document is okay, they can publish it; but if it needs to be tweaked further, they must incorporate the desired changes and then have their reporting managers review it again, approve it, and then publish it.

Solution

Before version 7: John or Alan could check out the document, make the required changes and then check the document back in as Version 3, so that the entire team of Globodox users (the whole department) could view the changes. But they could not check in the document in a way that only their reporting managers would review it for approval before the rest of the team could see the updated version.

Result: any error in the updated SOP document would be visible to the entire department, resulting in confusion among other team members and possible action against John and Alan.

But from now: Globodox will allow John or Alan (any one of them) to save the revised document as a draft document, so that their reporting managers can first review the changes made. This draft will be saved as a minor version - in this case, Version 2.1. If the document is not approved, it can be checked out again, necessary changes made and then checked back in as Version 2.2. This process can be repeated until the document is approved for publishing and release to the entire team. In that case, either John or Alan or anyone with the required permission, can check the document back in - this time not as a draft check in, but as a published document (Version 3.0 in this example). This will officially roll out the revised SOP for implementation across the department.

Result: Errors in the document will not be visible to anyone not granted permission to access the document while in draft mode. Thus there won't be any confusion about the document's contents and therefore, no action - neither against John, nor against Alan.

Note:

This scenario would work just as well if an SOP document did not exist but had to be created. In that case, John or Alan could create a new draft document from within Globodox and then carry on with the process of building the document, draft check in and so on, until it was ready for publishing.