How Clear Drafting Processes Will Save You Time & Confusion
- Scriptorium Team
- Oct 14
- 3 min read
Clear documentation is usually seen and reviewed by multiple people. It’s important that people with different perspectives and experiences have the opportunity to place their eyes on a document before it is published/shared, especially if it falls within their area of expertise. This helps ensure policies, procedures, and processes are captured accurately and that nothing important is left behind.
With this comes challenges for those who do not have a clear drafting process. Without knowing who is responsible for what and what the deadlines are, you can unintentionally introduce confusion and cause projects to drag on for longer than needed. To eliminate these struggles, it is important to:
Define responsibilities
Establish deadlines
Ensure clear communication
Define Responsibilities in the Drafting Process
When working on a project or drafting documentation, everyone involved must know what they are responsible for. If responsibilities are convoluted, people may overstep — not because they have ill intentions, but because they aren’t aware where their responsibilities start and end.
Ask yourselves the following questions:
Who is responsible for collecting the information to create an initial draft? This may involve consulting multiple people, but one person should be responsible.
Once an initial draft is created, who is responsible for reviewing it? More than one reviewer is recommended to ensure the information is clear and accurate.
If the reviewers have questions and/or comments, who is responsible for addressing and resolving them? This person is usually a Subject Matter Expert (SME) who is familiar with the material.
Once the document is complete, who is responsible for proofreading/testing? This person should be someone new, who was not involved in the drafting process. Writers often have difficulty catching their own mistakes.
Establish Deadlines
One final deadline is not enough. Without deadlines along the way, the drafting process can easily drag on for longer than intended.
Before beginning the project, look at everyone's schedules and determine realistic deadlines and checkpoints throughout the process to help the project stay on track. People need to know how long they have to complete their assigned tasks.
For example, if you have two months to draft an operations manual, but the person responsible for collecting the initial information has conferences for the first 2 weeks, and the person responsible for proofreading is on vacation for the last two weeks, you may need to make some changes.
It’s also easy for people to assume that since the final deadline is far away, they have plenty of time to complete their task(s) in the drafting process. More often than not, during this stage people can forget how many more tasks need to be completed before the final version is ready. Looking at the big picture before the start of a project and ensuring everyone is aware of the timelines they must adhere to can save a lot of stress along the way.
Pro tip: Leave some wiggle room before the final deadline in case a few steps along the way take longer than anticipated.
Ensure Clear Communication
Without clear communication, responsibilities and deadlines can get missed and lost. Hosting a project kick-off meeting before starting the drafting process can ensure that everyone involved knows:
What their role is
How long they have to complete their tasks
Who else is involved in the project
How many tasks there are overall
Who they can contact for questions about different topics (e.g., the manager for deadline concerns, the SME for product-related questions, etc.).
After the initial kick-off meeting, it is recommended that the workflow be tracked to ensure people are notified when it is their turn to step in. There are multiple platforms that can help you do this. For example, some people use columns in SharePoint to track statuses. Scriptorium uses Trello, a work management tool that can house project descriptions, deadlines, responsibilities, etc.
The exact platform isn’t as important as ensuring everyone has access to it and uses it. By using a shared platform consistently, individuals working on the draft process are provided with clear communication that ensures everything runs smoothly and that you can meet your deadline. Even a spreadsheet could be a great tool, but it isn’t beneficial if only one person has access to it and nobody keeps it up to date.
Need help establishing a clear drafting process? Scriptorium can help. Contact us to get your drafting process streamlined.
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