Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

This is a basic practice. It is unfortunate that many have either forgotten or never knew this practice concerning documents.

I find a document on the disk drive farm or network or whatever it is we call these things today. There are a jillion files out there, but I find the document I want to use.

Well, I think I found the document I want to use. There is no date or version number on the document. There is no author or authoring organization on the document. Hmmm, no one wrote this ever, but it seems to exist.

I wonder if this is the only document with the same title and filename on the bunch of disks I can access. There are all these different disks and all these different folders and folders in folders and so on. Some searches show me that there are several dozen files with the exact same file name scatter hither and yon.

Am I looking at “the right one?” Is there a “right one?” Gosh. This is confusing. Computers were supposed to make this simple(r).

Here is a fundamental practice:

• Have one file with one file name in one place.
• No duplicated copies anywhere else.
• All documents have authors, dates, and version numbers.
• If a document needs changing, the right people meet at the right time in the right place and change the document. The authors, dates, and version numbers change in a controlled manner.
• Anyone who needs the document can find it in the one place it is stored.

Boring? This depends on your point of view. Most people consider this document control stuff to be boring. Then again, most people who need the content of the document right now quickly find and use it, right now. They aren’t happy because they expect things to be this way.

Is this all passe’? Sorry, no it is not. I daily see people wasting hours trying to find the right copy of the right document in the right place at the right time.

We can do better.