Versioning is one aspect of document creation that has changed dramatically in the electronic sphere. The effort required to create a final document used to be more labor & resource intensive. I’m referring to documents that were first born on sheets of lined paper before being typed, with a typewriter, or even earlier forms of record creation. Mistakes on the final version would have been whited out, or hand corrected with initials next to it. Likely this also meant each document probably went through fewer rounds of revisions.
Sometimes when I’m working on a contract, the timelines are so tight that there will only be time for 1-2 revisions per cycle between the consultant(s) and the client. Since documents are often the deliverable, it’s usually determined in the project plan on which date each major draft or final document will be due. Often there’s not a lot of wiggle room on hitting these targets.
Even though the document may only go through 1-2 revisions between consultant and client, there are usually dozens of revisions that go on behind the scenes, especially when more than one person is collaborating. And then it becomes challenging to manage internal working drafts, drafts submitted and worked on with the client, final versions, post-final versions (because there are always more modifications!), and post-post final versions.
One would think existing in an electronic world would make this easier. In some ways it definitely does as the time, effort, and resources involved to create a new version is usually much easier. However, in the physical world, the look of the document often made it easy to determine the version status. For example, the difference between working drafts and a final in the typewriter days was easy. Handwritten papers = draft. Typed = final. Due to the labor and resource intensive process of producing a typed document, usually only one was circulated for revisions so it was much easier to keep track of if more than one person was working on it.
Although many document management systems come equipped with the functionality to allow multiple editors on the same document and version control, it can be tricky to enforce and use if access permissions aren’t set up properly. If documents are difficult for users to view and edit remotely, this can also result in documents getting emailed as attachments rather than being worked on from a DM system. These types of scenarios always result in the production of extra copies at all different stages in the versioning.
It always seems that we have the expectation that digital documents should have a higher standard of perfection (i.e. no typos or spelling mistakes) yet I find myself making allowances for spelling mistakes and typos all the time, even on final versions. In fact many people even put disclaimers in their signature line to excuse these types of mistakes. And this is on a format that auto-corrects and is easy to change. It’s really puzzling that we can’t use a fraction of the time saved from all this automation to at least proof read through our messages/documents before delivering them. Maybe we have become so used to seeing mistakes that we’ve just started accepting them as routine.