- Managing Reviews

Managing Reviews

The Controlled Documents area offers two tabs that provide information to help ensure documents are kept up to date and don’t stall at some point in their lifecycle.

The Change Requests tab gathers change requests from all documents and provides search tools to filter the results by the status of the change request (information below).

The Review Centre tab has a Quick Filter that allows selecting documents according to the state they are in, relative to their reviews (details below).

Approvers have a dedicated tab that collects any documents which require their approval of a review cycle (details below).

Review cycles can be completed before the review rounds have been completed if required (details below).

Change Requests tab

This tab is located by navigating to Laboratory Records > Controlled Documents > Change Requests. Change requests can be searched by the title of the corresponding document. Additional filters allow selecting the OU of the documents, the status of the change request (Pending, Approved, Approved for Future, Rejected, Awaiting Verification or Verified) and who requested the change.
Details about this tab and how to manage change requests can be found in the user guide, Document Change Requests.

Review Centre tab

Managers can use this tab to monitor general progress of document reviews in their department. They can easily identify any documents that require further action or are falling behind in their review process. They can also plan ahead by listing which documents are coming up for review. Documents which have fallen through the net and don’t have reviews set up can be located here too. All search results can be printed or exported to CSV for reports and further analysis.

Review Centre Search Area

The following filters are available:

  • Search - a document’s “Index”, “Name” or text from the “Description” field can be entered here
  • Quick Filter - the choices in the dropdown menu relate to the states worthy of attention in the review process of documents:
    • ‘Blank’ - brings up all authorised documents
    • Review currently in progress - filters documents which have a workflow in mid cycle; this includes overdue documents
    • Overdue - filters documents whose review-due date has lapsed
    • No review date set - filters documents which have the option “Require periodic review of this document” disabled and documents which do have a review workflow enabled but have no next review date set
    • Awaiting manual intervention - filters documents which require manual completion of the review cycle and have reached this step
      This is particularly useful because tasks are not generated for the Complete Review Cycle step.
    • Approval rejected - filters documents which have had the approval step rejected
      This is also very useful because documents in this state do not prompt any tasks for the document owners or users in the notification list.
  • OU - limits the results to documents from the selected Organisational Unit; ‘blank’ includes all OUs
  • Type - limits search to one of the types of documents available (e.g., Policies, SOPs, COSHH documents, etc.); ‘blank’ includes all types
  • Document Owner - filters any documents owned by the selected user
    This is a search-as-you-type field - matching results are listed in a dropdown menu as you type. The name must be clicked in the dropdown menu to select it.
  • Review date after and Review date before - these fields bring up a pop-up calendar when clicking them; a date range can be set based on the review date of documents

Producing Reports

Once a search has been performed, the list of results can be exported as a PDF (Print List) or as a CSV spreadsheet (Export List). These functions are found in the top right corner of the document search results area.
The Actions column in the results area displays a PDF icon when the document can be previewed on screen (documents like Excel files are not included, for example). Clicking it allows downloading an uncontrolled print of that document.

The Review column in the results area shows dates in red when the review is overdue.

Documents to Approve tab

The review approval step generates a task for the users responsible but they are often busy directors or managers. The Documents to Approve tab facilitates the process of approving multiple reviews in one step and keeping track of any missed reviews.

The tab is found by navigating to Tasks > My Tasks, from the global menu in the top right corner of the iPassport screen.

The icons in the Actions column can be used to approve (✓) or reject (x) the review of a single document. Clicking the magnifying glass or anywhere in the row, will jump to the document’s record. A back button is available in the document’s record to return to the Documents to Approve tab after viewing the document. If any actions or further navigating are made from the document, the back button will disappear.

To approve multiple reviews:

  1. Use the checkboxes in the left column to select documents one by one; the checkbox in the header area will select all the documents listed
  2. Click the button, Approve Selected in the top right corner of the document list
  3. In the lightbox that pops up, enter Comments in the field provided if applicable
  4. Click the button, Complete All to approve the reviews selected

Completing Reviews at any time

The document owner and users who have permission to ‘schedule reviews’ for a document can complete its review cycle at any time, overriding outstanding review feedback tasks in the review rounds. This is accomplished by selecting the option, Complete Review Cycle from the Actions dropdown menu and clicking Go.

If any change requests have been approved (and verified when applicable), the option to complete the review cycle disappears and the only option is to create a new version of the document.
If there are no approved change requests and there are still pending tasks, not completed by other reviewers, the option will remain available.
Triggering the Complete Review Cycle action will bring up a lightbox with a warning that any open (not completed) review feedback tasks will be invalidated.

If there is an approval step, it will still need to be completed unless a new version of the document is created.


This is the last article in this user guide.
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