Balancing Project Manager and Expert Analyst Roles When Reviewing Public Comments 

The public comment phase of rulemaking can be incredibly complex and involve hundreds of person-hours to complete. That means successful projects must be well-coordinated and organized, which puts a heavy burden on project managers. Plus, managers often spend as much time reviewing important submissions as they do organizing and following up with the rest of the team. Managers risk getting overwhelmed by the extra work and responsibility in many cases.

Fortunately, DocketScope® software can be a lifesaver for project managers dealing with projects with large numbers of public comments, even when many of those comments are substantive. DocketScope software is ideal for project managers because it is designed by project managers who have experienced the challenges of firsthand comment review—especially when managing a project.

Project managers are usually tasked with reviewing comments while also assigning comments to other team members as they come in. In many cases, they assign the most substantive and lengthy comments to the most experienced reviewers, which frequently means they end up handling many or all of these substantive comments themselves. This puts them in the difficult position of reviewing very technical and substantive submissions while still assigning comments to other team members—a challenging dual responsibility.

DocketScope software designers, aware of this problem, simplified both halves of this equation. The DocketScope mapping page incorporates a user-oriented highlight-and-map tool and cutting-edge optical character recognition (OCR) for PDF files, making it intuitive to analyze even the most technical comments. At the same time, assigning comments is also fast, with an easy-to-use comment selection and assignment tool and additional clustering and rules-creation tools that make it easier to group and assign similar comments.

Managing a comment review project can be daunting, often with short timelines and multiple responsibilities. Fortunately, DocketScope greatly simplifies this process for project managers, making this role more manageable and helping the entire team work together more effectively.