As you sit in endless project or status meetings, ask yourself: How many people around this table are producing content, and how many others are reviewing their work? Especially in large organizations with matrixed teams, you may find that the ratio is 90% for the review role.
Here are two examples:
- Business Requirements are written up by (1) hard-working Business Analyst after consultation with business partners, then reviewed (and pulled apart) by other analysts, architects, UI staff, PMs, systems analysts, development staff and quality assurance.
- A proposed Architecture Standard is presented by an excited team member after a month of quality research, then shot to pieces by a dozen other formal (or would-be) architects.
While the peer review role is a critical one, for many organizations the actual content creation process has turned into a thankless job, where it is all too easy for others to show up and pick apart the work. No preparation is needed for this sport – there is always something to find wrong with another’s work if given a few minutes.
Are you promoting the effort involved in content creation within your organization? How many team members never need to produce content of their own? What is the role of collaboration within your organization for major deliverables – are there incentives in place to gather multiple authors so that many have skin in the game?
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