Managing Document Change Requests
Introduction
Document Change Request is a functionality available in the document control module. The main use of this feature is to manage various change requests on a respective authorized document. To understand this better, we firstly need to understand how a document is created, put into review, and finally approved to be termed authorized as only authorized documents have the ‘DCR’ feature available on them.
How to create/find an authorized document
Follow the following steps to navigate to the right area to create a simple document.
Login to integrum > Main system navigation > Implementation & Operation > Operation Control. Click New document to open a draft document page which can then be made authorized or open an already authorized document from this view.
Refer to the ‘IMS Controlled Documents_V3’ guide to understand how to create a document, then put it to review and authorise it.
Next, once we locate an authorized document from the authorized document view (only displays authorized documents) or operational control view (displays all the documents irrespective of the status). Once we have located the right document, simply click on it to open it in a new tab.
This page has an action button called ‘Document Change Request’. See below 2 snips to understand what the documents look like in these 2 different views.
This is what an authorized document looks like in the operational control view:
And this is what the document looks like in the authorized view:
Keyword setting – Approval Method for Controlled Document Workflow
In the administration menu, navigate to the keyword and add/modify the following keyword. You need to create a new keyword if it has not been created yet and if it is already in the system, simply click on it to configure it correctly. See the snip below explaining the steps involved in the right order.
Configuring the keyword
The ‘Approval method for controlled document workflow’ keyword enables you to configure the workflow on DCR and provides options to configure email templates for notifications that are triggered when a DCR is submitted, approved, or rejected. Following snipe shows an easy sample template of what to add in this keyword:
Submit a document change request
Once we have located the document from a view, simply click on it to open the document and click on the ‘Document change request’ button on the action bar.
Action bar on an Authorized document view:
Action bar on an Operational document view:
When you click on this option, it will open a page in the new tab which looks like the following snip:
Fill in a Change title and Change request details, you can also add any attachments if applicable to support your request and hit submit. You can add multiple change requests if needed. After clicking on the submit button, the author of the document gets a notification of the request
Once submitted, the DCR requests can be seen in the respective document at the bottom of the page.
Review/approve/reject a document change request
When the author received the notification of a DCR, he/she can simply log in to the system to view who, when and what is the requested to change for by simply clicking on each request. Below is a sample snip of what the DCR box looks like after the author rejects or approves or puts the change request in review for the reviewers of the document to review before approving it.
Once one or more of these changes are approved by the author, the author will take the responsibility of incorporating these change requests in the document immediately by releasing a new version of the document or by waiting for the new review date of the document and incorporating these changes in the documents at the time before releasing the new revised version.
Also, any update from the author to these DCR’s will be emailed to the DCR initiator and can also be tracked in the audit trail of the respective DCR link (see snip below).
New Version of the document incorporating the DCR
To create a new version of the authorized document to incorporate the DCR, the author needs to simply click on the ‘New version’ button on the action bar on the document. This must be done by locating the document in the operational control view only. You can choose to create a brand-new version or keep the same version number. Normally, we will choose to keep the same version number if the DCR was a simple request like correcting a few spellings, etc. However, if the change was significant, we advise creating a new version completely.
From this step onwards we follow the normal steps of creating a new document with a revised version which follows the defined workflow.
