In the company that I work in, engineers would open up something called a Change Order (CO) within a project to allow space to create changes to what ever documents need to be changed. The person would then redline the most recent revision of the document within Microsoft Word using Track Changes. Like mentioned in Dr. Simon’s lecture, once the document is finished, a “Mark Up” version of the document is uploaded along with the “finished” document with all the changes. Once these are uploaded, functional groups such as quality, R&D, etc. are assigned to read over and approve the document depending on if they are impacted or are a functional group of interest. Approvals are collected in the change system (equivalent of signing the document) by each of the functional groups. Once the document has gotten all of its neccesary approvals, the document is approved, the revision number incremented and the document becomes the official current version.

This process can be very short or extremely long depending on what change is being done. If it is just a clerical change, it may be done in a week or even less. If it is something bigger such as updates to design control and the like, several weeks may be needed. It’s often a balancing act between the PM and functional groups needed to approve in reviewing the document properly and sticking to timelines.