Session 04: Assess Solution
Hey there! Welcome to this session of the Review Forum project where I am trying to establish a place for Cryptiquest content to be reviewed. In the last session I had launched a system and plotted out how to use it. In this session, I will assess the system and modify the process.
What was the system that was implemented?
A forum was created on Facebook and Reddit solely dedicated to reviewing Cryptiquest work. In addition, there was a Google Drive created specifically to host content for review.
The system has gone virtually unused. The Google Drive has been used for confidant reviews but there has been no members joining the the forums to elicit responses.
The problem with this is two-fold: not enough promotion of the system and not enough content to warrant the system. Or perhaps the level of promotion was appropriate in correlation to the amount of content. Either way, if there is no promotion, there are no reviewers, and if there are no reviewers, there are no reviews.
Options?
- I could push, sell, or otherwise promote the forums.
- I could find review forums that already exist and join those.
- I could create new forums that would draw in users.
- I could create a service to do this – like a social media platform for reviewers.
- I could sit on this until the content flow catches up to the forums.
It’s possible that even with a popular system, this wouldn’t draw reviewers. The reddit forum for Cypher Systems, for example, has few active members and while Cypher isn’t the most popular system, the popularity it does have is a milestone Cryptiquest strives to meet.
Another aspect to consider is what to do with a draft when the project has been edited and released. Should the draft stay out there forever or should it be “decommissioned” and removed? If it should be removed after review and I have no reviewers should it even be uploaded? Seems like wasted effort. This issue was not addressed in the original project planning sessions.
Looking back at the original goal of this project, the solution isn’t wrong, it’s a key component of the solution. Instead of asking a general audience to become reviewers, there needs to be a step where I place the draft in front of people in other forums to take a look. The current project management standards specify to send the work out for review but it does not say how to do so.
There is a step for conducing a need-analysis to identify the target audience. Perhaps, for Cryptiquest, there should be a step to explore ways to find this target audience to increase the effectiveness of the review process.
Perhaps the review process needs to be updated to reflect finding and reaching out to the target audience. But this does not address the “what-to-do-with-older-drafts” problem. I think the solution is to archive them. Turn off comments for older documents but leave them in place. In the Google folder, created an archive folder and place decommissioned documents in there and ensure editing is turned off (though viewing is fine). That way the older information can be preserved and it can build with content over time.
Action Items
- Update the Project Management Standards to reflect the outreach plan for reviewers among the target audience.
- Update the Project Management Standards to reflect adding a “Draft Decommission” process.
- Decommission all drafts from previous projects.