Best practices for Collaborative Reviews

Collaborative Reviews are a great way to get feedback if managed well. The following are some best practices for using Collaborative Reviews.

Getting ready for a review

Before creating a Collaborative Review, you can do the following to prepare:

Make sure reviewers are set up as users in advance so that there are no barriers for a review.
Make sure email notifications are set up for Collaborative Reviews.
Add topics to a temporary map if you want feedback on only a few topics. The Collaborative Review you create from the map will contain only the topics you need reviewed.

While creating a Collaborative Review, try the following:

Use due dates to communicate deadlines.
Use a consistent naming convention for Collaborative Reviews, such as [map title]_[product release]_[date]. If you create multiple rounds of reviews, it is easier to tell Collaborative Reviews apart.
Add ditavals when generating a Collaborative Review so that the reviewers can see the final output for content with conditional profiling attributes.
Use ditavals and conditional profiling attributes to output a version of the Collaborative Review that more effectively targets a group of subject matter experts (SMEs) with focused content.

Once the review has started, you can do the following:

Encourage reviewers to mark themselves as finished so that you can see they are done with the Collaborative Review.
Consider closing a Collaborative Review and creating a new one if there are many changes from the first few reviewers. Collaborative Reviews are a snapshot of the content at the time they are created, so reviewers do not see changes you make from feedback.
Move a Collaborative Review to In Discussion status to work with annotations. It stops reviewers from adding new annotations while you resolve the existing ones.
Move a Collaborative Review to Done status once you are finished so that reviewers no longer see it as an assignment.