I'm Brendan Hyland. I help regulated facilities transform their software, spreadsheets, workflows and documents from time-consuming, deviation-invoking, regulatory burdens, to the competitive advantage they were meant to be. Join me every week as we take a few minutes to explore, design, test and improve the critical systems we use in our facilities.
Document and Signing Workflows
|
Ever since COVID, document and signing workflows have been incorporated into everything. Dropbox has it. Microsoft Teams has it. Google Workspaces has it. If you need e-signatures, you probably have access to Docusign, Adobe, Hellosign, and so on. But what exactly are we talking about when we say "document and signing workflow"? Let's step back. Most document workflows are about moving some work through review, commentary, revision and approval. The old way to do this was to send a document out by email, receive 4 copies back, try to incorporate the comments and changes (or, more often, start incorporating the first set, give up half way and ignore the rest) and send it back out again. Repeat a few times before being printed, signed and scanned for approval: A modern document workflow basically works the same way, except without all the spaghetti. The routing, versions and comments are controlled from a centralized location, so the main back and forth is notification messages. We can leverage the collaborative features of the document format to record all changes and comments in one central version of the document, while still retaining a history of all changes: The automation part is that the workflow steps are managed by the central server, advancing through depending on how each actor responds to the review / approval request. At the end of the process you get your final document along with and some record of the approval process. This may or may not be accompanied with signatures of some sort. Which brings us to a quote that might have been Benjamin Disraeli, or Mark Twain lying: There are lies, damned lies, and statistics And just as in lies, there are signatures, signatures, and signatures. Until next time, thanks for reading! – Brendan p.s. Enjoy this message? Read more at the Hyland Quality Systems website. |
The Daily HaiQu
I'm Brendan Hyland. I help regulated facilities transform their software, spreadsheets, workflows and documents from time-consuming, deviation-invoking, regulatory burdens, to the competitive advantage they were meant to be. Join me every week as we take a few minutes to explore, design, test and improve the critical systems we use in our facilities.
It’s the first step of the problem solving framework that I was taught back in Engineering school. Not ‘Plan’. Not “Define”. “I want to and I can”. That particular framework - the McMaster Six Step - never gained the popularity of the ones now used today, but in the end they all contain the same basic elements - research, planning & design, implementation, evaluation and iteration - just stated in different ways. However I’ve never really seen this particular element called out explicitly...
My eight year old son figured out a hack to make the music service work better for him. The kids have a Google smart speaker that is attached to a Spotify account so they can just ask for any of their favourite music. Anyone who has pre-teens in the house probably knows how much such a setup is used - all day every day. Coming from someone who had to run to the double-cassette boom box to press the record button any time a new favourite song came on the radio just so I could listen to it...
I’ve seen several quality leaders complain this week about their disappointment with generative AI - they’re not getting the results they expected. And I understand why - context is king! If you just ask AI to write a procedure or generate a quality document, you’ll get generic, mediocre output. Without enough context, AI can only produce something generic based on its training data. But how do you give it that context? By the time you’ve gone back and forth trying to “engineer the prompt” to...