Innovations in Policy Draft Development that Saved Me Time and Tears
It was 10 p.m. on the night before the new draft of our Title IX policy was due for review by our Chief Policy Officer, the final step before it could move to President’s Council and on to Trustees for (fingers crossed) approval and adoption. It was crunch
time, just a couple of weeks out from the new Title IX rule’s August 14th deadline, and I was elbows deep and hours into a heavy edit of what I was promised was the final draft from its writing committee. That’s when the emails started.
First, it was, “Just one more quick thing . . .” and “Can you change these lines, too?” then a flurry of discussions, and with it, more and more requested revisions, which I dutifully and meticulously incorporated. And then it happened. The dreaded “I
made some additional changes to the draft throughout; see the attached draft.” No, no. I protested internally. That is not the Draft. I have the Draft. That is the Ghost of Drafts Past with (groan) new revisions!
If you have ever edited anything for anyone ever, you likely just visibly shuddered at the above scenario. Every editor will inevitably, at one point or—more likely—many points, experience the same sinking feeling when the sanctity of version control
is casually disregarded. But with documents as important as policies (especially ones as critical and time sensitive as the one mentioned above), the balance between editorial courtesy and non-discretionary necessity becomes heavily (and rightfully)
skewed toward the latter. So, what’s a policy editor to do, besides swallow her tears and play a very long, very high-stakes game of Spot the Differences? Which is, inevitably, exactly what I did for the next few hours of my evening.
The following morning, I woke from a (dismally short) sleep and decided something had to change about our editorial process. Over the past few months of remote work, our institution has embraced using Microsoft Teams to keep in touch with co-workers and
collaborate on projects, but, at the time, we were still using shared Box folders to store working drafts and their numerous past versions. And while Box integrates well enough with Teams, files hosted through Box do not have the same advanced capabilities
as files hosted on Microsoft’s cloud services SharePoint and OneDrive. As long as we continued to insist on keeping files scattered on Box, in emails, and on our internal drives, we truly weren’t utilizing Teams to its full potential, and we were
creating a lot more unnecessary work for ourselves. Little did we realize we were needlessly complicating a system already automated and optimized through Office 365.
How it Works and How it Works for Us
Like ours, many institutions have adopted Teams for remote communication and project collaboration as we all continue to navigate the new normal of current events. But many Teams users are not aware of what happens behind the scenes of Teams. Every file
(including all documents, notebooks, wikis, Planner tasks, calendar entries, and everything in between) shared or created within a Teams channel is uploaded to SharePoint (or OneDrive in the case of files shared in chats). (If you use Teams and haven’t
already, I highly encourage you to take a few minutes and explore what your SharePoint site looks like. Think of it as Teams’ central repository—because it is.)
The benefits of this, besides embedded organization and easy access to needed files without leaving Teams, are the integrated collaboration and cross-app features you only get with SharePoint and OneDrive files (Microsoft hosted files play nice with Microsoft
apps, go figure!). These features include automatic saving (no more losing progress), automatic version record keeping (eliminating the need for multiple version files), and, most importantly for our office, collaborative editing between multiple
authors in real time (goodbye, Ghosts of Drafts Past).
By embracing and encouraging the use of Teams instead of email for sending drafts and Box for housing versions, we were able to ensure that a single working draft was always live and available for authors, editors, and reviewers. Consequently, the next
round of review and revision for our Title IX policy went far more smoothly. We were able to work together, simultaneously, on a living document in real time and chat seamlessly with each other as needed, eliminating the need for tracking down relevant
email chains, sending out and downloading multiple drafts, re-uploading them, and other general draft babysitting and housekeeping. The sanctity of the working draft was respected without effort. It was a game changer.
Since then, we have integrated this process into how we handle every document that comes through our office, and we continue to explore additional ways to utilize the automation, collaboration, and project management features embedded within SharePoint.
It might be dramatic to say that it has revolutionized our editorial process, but it certainly has spared me a lot of extra work and frustration (not to mention, late-night tears).
For those who are interested in utilizing collaborative editing but need additional guidance, Microsoft provides tips and tutorials on their support pages, a few of which I will link below:
I hope this post finds you all well and each one of you survived Title IX season relatively unscathed. I would love to hear how your institutions handled the crunch—the challenges, the triumphs, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Let me know your experiences
or if you’ve found any game changers for remote collaboration. And, as always, if you have any questions for me regarding the topics above, feel free to drop them into the comments.
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