peer review and quality control

[Troll]

Rightyho-Own up! Who out there operates a thorough quality control system in terms of commercial report writing?

..knowledge without action is insanity and action without knowledge is vanity..(imam ghazali,ayyuhal-walad)

[sniper]

try to maintain an internal quality control with my reports as well as emailing them to people for comment before they get included in reports, sent to external clients etc. Can't say that I have ever had to make massive changes though, guess I must just be good or more likely, no one else knows what I'm going on about so I could be writing utter rubbish and no one would ever know...

++ i spend my days rummaging around in dead people ++

[deepdigger]

Nope!

deep

[Cautionary Tale]

All the units/companies I've worked for had some sort of quality control or editing (whether it was enshrined formally in QM or QA or otherwise). As sniper says, the more specialist the report is, the less comment you are likely to get about the thrust of the report, rather than just the gramar or spilling [sic]. I have tended to find in my current job the review is quite thorough as another archaeologist reads the report then it's reviewed by the PM who invariably is not an archaeologist. This tends to cover the technical bits of the report and also making sure its readable and doesn't assume too much knowledge, which is good for the general readship.

Of the Clan Sutton

[1man1desk]

No report goes out of our company without thorough checking and editing. They all require sign-off by the author, a named checker and the project director.

We also receive many reports from archaeological contractors for our approval before finalisation, and it appears that many contractors do not check/edit nearly as thoroughly as we do. In one recent case we had to send the report back 4 times before they got it right.

This p***es us off quite substantially.

1man1desk

to let, fully furnished

[historic building]

In my experience a good number of units do not even have the basic quality control of having staff with the necessary knowledge or experience to write the report in the first place yet they will still take on the work.

[troll]

Largely due to the fact that consultants keep these mickey mouse units on the books despite having to send reports back time and time again.If the reports are garbage-what sort of standard do these consultancies imagine the fieldwork is carried out to? There really is no excuse anymore.We are either a modern accountable profession or cowboys.No inbetween.Make no mistake-it`s not just field units-I worked for a consultancy once where basic literacy was clearly optional.Sold at ?8oo a day too.

..knowledge without action is insanity and action without knowledge is vanity..(imam ghazali,ayyuhal-walad)

[sniper]

and what about units who don't even produce reports within a reasonable time. We have a 12 week after end of excavation deadline for assessment reports to be finished and I think that is as it should be. Have tried to find reports for sites I worked on the year before last, and as far as I can see, the SMR has no record of any reports being submitted. Can that be acceptable?

++ i spend my days rummaging around in dead people ++

[troll]

For some bizarre reason-unless the submission of a report falls outside of a ten-year (yes-TENyear) submission time, a certain organisation wil do nothing about it.

..knowledge without action is insanity and action without knowledge is vanity..(imam ghazali,ayyuhal-walad)

[sniper]

ten flipping years? have to hope that people have very good memories or that the records were absolutely perfect. And in the meantime very important material may be languishing in boxes with no one outside the unit knowing anything about it. great.

++ i spend my days rummaging around in dead people ++