Your Quality Tip for Today: If you are using the “Track Changes” mechanism in Microsoft Word (which is a nice collaboration tool, to be sure), when you wrap up the work on that important and politically sensitive memo, and e-mail it off to various company managers and execs and officers …
… then be sure you’ve done an “Accept Changes” on the doc before you click “Send.” Especially if you’re then going out to lunch and will be unavailable for someone to call you up and let you know about the gaffe.
(No, it wasn’t me, but I was on the CC list — very low man on the totem pole, I assure you. And, no, no deleted things remained visible, but a number of other typo edits and text additions were still highlighted. Embarrassing.)
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Metadata… it sucks, but it’s so useful. Take it a step beyond the gaffe that you mentioned:
What happens if you took a contract you made with a vendor, made a few edits, and submitted it to another vendor?
What happens if you billed the client for your time at $500 per hour when it was just a scrub associate that did the work for what should have been $250 per hour?
What happens if you submit an document about WMD that supposedly came from your intelligence community, but was actually a doctored document from the intelligence community of an ally in support of military action that your ally wanted to wage?
All stuff that’s happened to people who weren’t careful about their metadata.