How does your team lock out authors after the review cycle is done? We're stuck!

Hi! Our proposal's authors and reviewers (our SMEs and sellers) have completed their work in RFPIO Projects & we need to make them stop editing the content while our internal proposal gurus do edits. How do we do this? Please help! Marking a section as "Complete" isn't enough because "Reopening" a section takes 2 clicks. One proposal team member suggested deleting all the authors and reviewers from the team; I don't think this is recommended either. TIA!

Proposal Management

Comments

Helene H

Hi @Aurora Nichols - the only way to lock a team member from editing is to remove them from the question.

My workflow suggestion would be for the Reviewer to remove the Author once they began their review process.

Another potential idea would be to re-educate the SMEs to understand when the question is no longer in their domain. If they have additional information they'd like to include, maybe you can re-direct them to post a comment, that the reviewer can then choose to add if they'd like?

I've linked a few helpful resources that you can customize to fit your specific workflow. Let me know if that helps!

Author Workflow (10m)
Collaboration/Review (10m)

Elaine Crann

I have a somewhat similar challenge...

When an Author re-assigns questions via the section (and not by question); questions that aren't even assigned to them are now assign to the new author. New author then reaches out, confused, unsure what they should do with the answers that they are unsure of.

Why can an Author/Review (which in our case is the same person) reassign questions that are assigned to others?

Elizabeth Bissell

@Aurora Nichols Random idea...no clue if it would work as I have never needed to try it. But, what if once your SME team has finished their portion of the work, you mark the Project as "Complete". But, after you do this, you Clone the Project and make sure to de-select "Include Section Authors and Reviewers". Then you have 1) the Original project that retains the audit trail of who answered what and when, BUT they can no longer make edits as the project is closed, and 2) a Cloned Project that lets your RFP gurus do what they do best (proof, review, sanitize, expand, condense, etc.).

I realize this idea is a bit out there, and depending on how your account is set up (project or user-based) will determine how you need to adapt your processes (i.e. if Project Based, you will need to watch the project count). And, you will likely need to set up precise naming conventions to make sure you know which is the SME-answered Project and which is the RFPGuru-answered project.

Aurora Nichols

@Beth Bissell this is a great idea! I will take this forward to our team to see what they think about this innovation. Big thanks! :-)

Elizabeth Bissell

Happy to help! Let me know if it works, lol :)

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