Managing a review process as an admin can be quite the adventure! Applicants are counting on you to guide their work to the right reviewers, while reviewers need to offer clear feedback to help the Dean or Department Head make swift decisions. It's all about effective communication, setting clear expectations, and keeping an eye on the timeline. With a bit of careful planning from start to finish, you'll be able to meet everyone's needs.
As you set up the application process, it's helpful to have a sense of how the final awardees will be picked. This choice typically depends on feedback from one or more rounds of reviews by individuals or committees who approve, rate, or rank applications based on various criteria.
With all these options, where does an administrator start? Here are some tips to help you think through and clarify your review process.
Map it out
- Gather your colleagues around your favorite whiteboard, or keep it simple with scratch paper.
- Draw out your review process from start to finish, and notice any gaps or areas that need clarification.
- Identify what types of review steps you will need, who will be involved, and how the reviews in one step may be used in subsequent steps of the review workflow.
Work backward
- What information do your decision makers need to make award decisions?
- What is the right amount of feedback you’ll need per application, considering length, time to review, and the number of reviewers involved?
- Make sure the questions in the application form relate to the review questions in order for reviewers to have enough information to properly fill out their assigned reviews.
Mind the time
- While you are considering what information your reviewers need to make decisions, also take into account your deadlines.
- If decisions need to be made by a certain date, how long will your reviewers need to make those decisions?
- Do you have time to build in a cushion if reviewers don’t complete work on time?
- Unfortunately, sometimes the timeframe for reviewing is tight. Set clear expectations for when reviews need to be completed upfront with your reviewers, and prepare a Plan B, perhaps reassigning reviews if needed.
- If you are using the InfoReady platform, reviewers and deadlines can be reassigned at any time, and automated emails will inform reviewers of new reviews
Include plenty of instructions
- Reviewers need to know exactly what they’re supposed to do, especially if they are a first-time InfoReady user.
- Common items to include are a short description of the RFP, a rubric, and how to access the application (either by clicking the PDF button at the top of the page, or viewing on screen).
- In InfoReady, instructions can be included both in emails sent to your reviewers (creating a template makes this process easy to repeat) and space is included for instructions for each question in the form itself.
Quantify feedback
- If you have an existing evaluation form with descriptors like “Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor”, consider making this into a 4-point rating scale.
- The labels will help reviewers assign a number, but the numbers will be easier to make sense of later on when extracting reports from the system.
- Whatever scale you end up using, providing guidance to your reviewers in the instructions on what a rating indicates, can help forestall confusion as they dive into their assigned applications.
- Rating scales in InfoReady are independent of each other, meaning that putting more weight in certain criteria is quick and easy to accommodate. The InfoReady can also calculate numeric scales for you, saving you time and effort.
