How to Catch Document Flow Mistakes Before They Spread

The best way to ensure that document flow errors don’t spread is to catch them before they spread. Even with errors accumulating, a document flow might look healthy on the surface. The document appears to be in the right place, and the document name appears to be accurate, and work seems to be proceeding. Except that an update is skipped, or an out-of-date document is accidentally passed along, or a document intended for approval is assumed to be approved. For document flow, it’s better to make a beginner focus on accuracy rather than speed. Constantly check for document flow errors where document flow errors tend to hide. As you learn to spot document flow errors before they spread, document flow becomes more reliable. This is how you should go about it.

Take a short document chain and then reverse it. Start with an apparently complete document, and then ask what the prior step was. Was there a review copy? Was the document name changed to make the distinction clear? Was the previous version retired or did it linger in the active file? This technique makes it easier to spot document flow errors that are hard to spot if you simply go with the flow. It’s also a good way to begin thinking of document flow in terms of sequential decisions rather than discrete actions. One of the most common document flow errors is to focus on content while neglecting status. This is often the case with beginner.

A document is reviewed for spelling, formatting, pagination, and the document is assumed to be ready since no problems are found. However, a document can be perfect in its content but wrong in its status. The document might still need to be reviewed or approved or verified before it can be moved along. The fix is to always review a document twice in a limited way. Once for content, once for status. Document content and status are not the same thing, and document flow errors occur when they are treated as though they are the same thing.

When document flow errors keep happening, it’s time to perform a quick versioning drill. Take two similarly-named documents and place them side by side, for example a review version and a final version. Then inspect the attributes that distinguish the documents. The document name, the version number, the location, any other attribute that indicates whether the document is active or inactive. Then close the documents and attempt to describe the difference. This exercise seems trivial, but it actually sharpens your judgment. It trains you to pay attention to working attributes rather than intuitive attributes, and that’s important because documents often begin to look the same after a while.

You can perform a quick versioning drill in fifteen minutes. Spend the first five minutes finding three documents that pertain to the same process but are at different stages. Spend the next six minutes inspecting each document for name, version, status, location, and making one correction when something seems off. Use the last four minutes to quickly consider the error that almost occurred and why it almost occurred. The last step is important because it turns a one-time correction into a pattern you can recognize the next time.

As you train yourself to recognize document flow errors before they spread, you begin to notice that document flow seems cleaner and more reliable. You’re not relying on instinct so much as reading the attributes embedded in documents and stages. The process becomes less frantic because fewer errors are passed into later stages where they become much harder to correct. Being meticulous doesn’t make the process slower over time. It makes each document more defined, and that definition is what makes the process faster over time.