What People Have To Say About Review Practices in Their Organizations
At various points in time we launch surveys to gain a deeper understanding of how people perceive review practices in the pharmaceutical and biomedical industries. I want to share some of these findings with you today.
The surveys focus on different aspects of review practices: tools of review, nature of review guidance, efficacy of review practices and then we always ask how happy people are with the current state of the art of review in their organization. The majority of the survey questions ask for the frequency with which a specific action takes place in the organization. We work on a scale ranging from never to always.
The following results come from a recent survey we did looking at review practices in clinical research organizations. We wanted to see whether responses would be similar across different types of research organizations. We sent the survey out to pharmaceutical and medical device companies, contract clinical research organizations, and institutional research organizations (primarily institutions associated with major universities).
The net-net on this survey is that we did not really find differences in how people felt about review practices in their respective organizations. The sentiments of the majority of respondents proved to be very similar as they felt much could be done to improve review practice and review outcomes.
Here are some of the more interesting findings from this survey:
I am allowed sufficient time to do a thorough/complete review of documents sent to me–54% of the respondents said often to always and 23% said they occasionally get enough time.
The response here was interesting because in our consulting work with pharmaceutical companies, the lack of time for review is a constant theme across companies. These results suggest that more often than not, clinical research organization are doing a pretty good job of allocating reasonable blocks of time for document reviews.
We set/establish the review time line according to the size and complexity of the documents under review–29% said this happens occasionally and 34% said this happens rarely or never.
The response pattern here suggests that most organizations take the “one size fits all” approach to review–whether the document is one page or one hundred pages, you get the same amount of time.
We are able to produce final version documents with only two rounds of review–here only 4% of respondents said always while 49% said this either occurred rarely or never.
We asked this question because we find it to be a standard business practice to set expectations that research reports and other business documents will be completed in two rounds of review. As you can see half the respondents said this expectation is rarely or never met. You do have to wonder why organizations keep setting these document development expectations and then do little to help their teams and personnel to achieve the targets.
We use email attachments to distribute documents for review–here 52% of the respondents said this occurred often or always.
So much for making use of document management systems to point people to a common file and assure effective version control. In essence this practice makes email servers into the “real” storehouse of knowledge and document versions. The use of email as the distribution and storage tool plays out this way because many document management systems are anything but flexible in accommodating user ways of working. As my colleague Philip often says, “we expect people to adapt their ways of working to the technology we buy and are always surprised when they don’t.”
The majority of review comments made in my documents concern matters of accuracy and edits for style and grammar–here 45% of the respondents said this happens often or always and 41% said occasionally.
We asked this question because we wanted to get a sense of what people are actually “doing” when they review a document. The response here is similar to what we have seen in out detailed analyses of review practice at specific companies and suggests that people are indeed busy assessing textual structure versus meaning. This text-based focus likely keeps them from assessing a document for soundness of logic, completeness of message, and usability for the target reading audience.
We will have an informational webinar on strategic review on February 24 where we will talk more about what we have learned from these surveys, our close analysis of review practices in clinical research enterprises, and what action can be taken to correct or counter the effects of poor review practices. We’ll have more details on the webinar in an upcoming post.
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