Lack of documented process led to duplicative rework

The Issue: 

One company I worked at had a complicated training development process. The trainings were derived from regulation manual chapters that were focused on a specific topic. A technical writer would write the chapter and then pass them to me to create the accompanying training materials. Concurrently an expert in the regulation would read the chapter and ensure that it matched the information in the regulation. In many cases changes had to be made. Since I produced 4 different training versions from each chapter, that also meant that I had to go back and do any reworks in quadruplicate.

The Solution: 

I sat down with the team and developed a new business process which had the technical writer send the chapter directly to the expert for review. Once it passed, the expert would send the chapter to me directly, this would ensure that the document was accurate and no rework was needed. Additionally the expert would send it to our translator and they would send me the foreign language version as well.

The Results: 

It’s hard to quantify the exact amount of time saved by doing the process this way because some chapters only required a little rework and others required a significant amount. As a rough estimate, based on the average amount of time I was spending redoing work that should have been accurate, I estimate that I we saved $6,500 annually in rework costs.