I have mentioned multiple times in the past how my way of working has been influenced by best practices most commonly encountered (and to a large extent developed) in the IT industry.
(That being said the same industry is responsible for some of the most unethical ways of making money in my view, which isn’t bound to change anytime soon to the extent that people don’t change their buying habits. I will refrain from going into details of those ways for the time being.)
One of my favorite practices that I have borrowed from the software development industry, is that of keeping multiple versions of the same deliverable in my backup systems. I used to take this for granted, but the amount of people that I have worked with, with a mindless urgency of overwriting their changes in a single file, has led me to believe that this approach isn’t so widespread after all.
Yet, ironically, most of these same people are also grateful of review features incorporated in the standard MS Office suite, like the “Track changes” feature found in MS Word for example.
Imagine being a manager who’s asked their team to make some amendments in a .docx deliverable. Wouldn’t you ask them to make their amendments using the “Track Changes” feature so you could review with ease? Even better, you could use the same feature to roll back any changes which you didn’t like (just click reject).
But what about best practices like proper record-keeping? How will you remember what had transpired back then, what changes were made by each member, which ones were accepted and which ones were rejected? How do you ensure that you are learning from each engagement? Version control measures aren’t visible to your clients and oftentimes may even sound like redundant admin work. But in reality, they are one of those few things that separate proper professionals from the rest of the crop.