# Final to wait for a document's fourth issue

> A School of Continuous Improvement paper follows twelve quarterly reports through a freight-forwarding office's shared drive, and the University adopts a fourth-issue threshold for the word final in its own documents.

The Master of Applied Measurement teaches by case, and its newest concerns the
word a freight-forwarding office puts at the front of a filename when it judges
a report ready to be read. "Final Is Version Four", a paper released today by
the School of Continuous Improvement, follows twelve quarterly reports through
one branch's shared drive, and the University has carried what it found into the
way it names its own documents.

> The branch let us read a whole folder over their shoulders, and the least we
> could do was be as plain with the folder as they were with us.
>
> --- Dr Torun Ezeigwe, Senior Lecturer and Director, Master of Applied
> Measurement

The case team set each report's successive saves beside one another, noted when
the word first appeared and what followed it, and then proposed that the branch
hold the word back until a report's fourth issue. The branch adopted the
proposal for six quarters and met it in each of them, and the paper sets out
what the rule altered and what it left where it was.

On that basis the University has adopted the Finality Floor. From the next
review cycle, no document issued in its name may carry the word final in its
title or filename before its fourth issue, and the Review Cadence Observatory
will return any earlier claimant unread. Dr Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Lecturer and
Convenor, Capability Sprints, said the Sprints "will be glad to put the case in
front of working teams" when the next intake opens.

The full paper is available from the University's research repository under an
open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.wizqe8.