How do you manage late proofs? Looking for best practices.

Hi Chris,

In regards to dealing with old (now redundant) proofs, your suggestion of changing the role to read only is one option. Some other options you have are to update the proof so that the person who gave the approval (assuming someone did!) is the primary decision maker, therefore providing an overall decision on the proof. Or you could remove the person(s) that did not provide a decision from the proof altogether. Any of these options should complete the review process, it just depends on what your preferences are. Whichever option, I would always add a comment against the document outlining what was done and why so that there is a record of why the reviewers were removed / changed for audit trail.

However my advice to anyone experiencing an issue like this is to try and identify and address the root cause in order to prevent this from happening in the first place. i appreciate that this is often easier said than done(!), but getting to the bottom of why this is happening will prevent you from having to run around clearing up old proofs in the future. Some questions that I would ask are:

• Do the users know how to reiew proofs and provide a decision? Is additional training needed?
• Are the proofs relevant to the decision makers that were selected? From your post, it sounds like the document has progressed anyway without all approvals?
• Are the outstanding proof decisions visible enough to them (do they need a report / dashboard building in order to better visualise what is needed from them)?
• Do you need more than one approval on a proof? (i.e. if a user sees that someone else has already approved, do they think that their approval is no longer needed). You can configure the proof so that only one decision is required and not several, if needed.

I hope this helps!

Best Regards,

Rich.