Use Inspections to Manage Commitments
A successful project needs more than just a blanket agreement between team members. It's very easy for someone to "agree" to a document, only to turn around later and decide that he didn't fully understand what he was agreeing to. Instead, the project team needs to reach a true consensus, where each person fully supports the document. The goal of an inspection is to build consensus on the document by gaining a real commitment from everyone who has read it. When a reviewer approves a document, he takes responsibility for its contents, and if the document has defects, he shares some of the blame for missing the mistake.
The best way to reach consensus among the inspection team is for each person to feel like he or she made a real contribution to the document. The inspection meeting accomplishes that by allowing each person to find problems in the document and help the rest of the team find a solution to each problem. This is why it's important for the team to go beyond just pointing out the defects in the document and actually come up with replacement wordings that fix the defects.
By the end of the meeting, nobody remembers that one person suggested this sentence, and another suggested that one; everyone feels a sense of ownership because it was a real group effort. That ownership means that each team member leaves the meeting with a real commitment to the document. This can eliminate many of the conflicts that can cause problems later on in the ...