Revision management

What revision management is

Revision management is a set of small rules that guarantee one current version of every piece of content, named so that anybody can tell it is the current one, kept where everybody already looks, with the comments attached to it rather than scattered. Setting it up is mostly an afternoon of decisions and an hour of moving files. Running it is a habit.

It is not a technical system and it needs no new software. It works on a shared drive, or in whatever project tool you already use, because the problem was never the storage. The problem is that four people have four copies, two are called final, and the one that was published is neither.

It is also not the store of finished work. Where the approved, published piece and its images live afterwards, so the next person can find them, is the content library. Revision management covers the messy part before that: the drafts, while they are still moving.

When you need one

The first sign is somebody editing a version superseded a week ago, and nobody noticing until the corrections come back a second time. The second is a piece going live with a paragraph that was cut two drafts earlier. Both are wasted money, and both are common the moment more than two people touch a draft.

The third case is a business where drafts travel as attachments. Attachments fork: each person who opens one starts a private copy, and from that moment there is no current version, only several recent ones.

You do not need this if you write, edit and publish alone. One person can live with dated files and no rules. If several of you are involved but the real complaint is that nothing ever gets approved, the problem is upstream: buy chasing the sign-off instead, and add these rules later.

What the rules are

• One location per piece, and it is not an inbox. Every piece lives in one folder on a shared drive, or one card in whatever project tool you already use. Drafts are linked, never attached. A file sent as an attachment does not count as a version and is not read.
• A naming rule anyone can follow. The same shape every time: the piece, the version number, the state. Something like spring-catalogue-intro-v4-for-approval. No dates in the name, because dates go stale and lie, and never the word final, because there are always two of those.
• One current version, at the top. Exactly one file is marked current. When a new version is made, the old one moves the same day into an earlier-drafts folder beside it. Nothing is deleted, because an argument about a cut paragraph is settled in thirty seconds if the old draft still exists.
• Comments go in one place. In the document, on the piece itself. Not in email, not in a message thread, not read out on a call and remembered. If a comment arrives by another route, it gets copied into the document by whoever received it, so the piece carries its own history.
• Version numbers change for a reason. A new number when the piece goes out to somebody. Small fixes within a round do not earn one. That keeps the count honest, so version seven means something about the piece rather than about the typing.
• The published version is filed. When a piece goes live, a copy of exactly what was published is saved with the piece. That is the version anyone later edits from.

What you get

A one-page rule sheet. The naming rule, the location rule, the comment rule, with two examples of each. One page, because a five-page version does not get followed.

The folders set up. Your existing drafts sorted into them, the current version of each identified and marked, and the rest filed as earlier drafts. This is the part people never do themselves.

A short walk-through. Twenty minutes with the people who write, comment and approve, because these rules only work if everyone uses them, and one person carrying on with attachments undoes the lot.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A small bakery supplying cafes across two provinces is rewriting its product sheets: eighteen products, each with an ingredient list and an allergen statement. Four people are involved, including a food safety consultant who comments by email and a designer who lays the sheets out. The allergen wording on one sheet is corrected, then reappears uncorrected in the proof, because the designer worked from a copy attached to an email three weeks earlier.

The fix takes an afternoon. Every product gets one folder, one current file named for the product and its version, and everything older moved beside it. The consultant's emailed comments are pasted into the document by the person who receives them, so the file carries every allergen change with a date against it. The designer is sent a link rather than a file, and she checks the marked current version each time she starts a sheet. The remaining fourteen sheets go through with no reprinting, and the allergen wording on all eighteen can be traced to the comment that produced it.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Who touches drafts, where they currently live, and what has gone wrong recently. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Agreed before anything starts.
3. Access. To the shared drive or project tool you already use, and to the last few months of drafts wherever they actually are.
4. The sort-out. One to three working days, depending on how much there is: folders built, current versions identified, everything else filed as earlier drafts.
5. The rule sheet and the walk-through. One page written, twenty minutes with the people who have to follow it, and a fortnight later a quick check that they still are.

What it costs

Quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call. It is a small job for most businesses, and a larger one where several years of drafts have to be sorted before the rules can start. The pricing page shows the four ways I work, so you can see where a job this size sits. The number is fixed in writing before anything starts, and if the sorting turns out to be bigger than the call suggested, I say so before doing it.

What happens next

With one current version in place, the next thing people fix is the finished end: approved work and images filed where anyone can find them, which is the content library. Some find the version arguments were really disagreements about house style, which a style guide settles once. Others discover the drafts were never the problem and the sign-off was, and move to approval management. None of it is assumed. This is a complete piece of work on its own, and the rules keep working whether or not I am still involved.