Questions and Responses

Questions and Responses

Questions in Document Builder are designed to help Project Owners and Editors obtain administrative information needed to administer their project; and automate the inclusion/exclusion of conditional language in documents.

Before questions appear in projects, they are configured during your onboarding process, and managed by Administrators.

This article covers how to add and edit questions; and best practices for Administrators manage questions over time.




Admin: How to add and edit questions

To add new or edit existing questions:
  1. Go the Configuration page and click the tab Questions
  2. Click "Add New Question" to add new
  3. Click the pencil icon to Edit an existing question


When creating a new question, you'll be prompted to provide required and optional information. The fields include:

  • New Question Details:
    • What question would you want to ask someone to determine whether they need to use a given Section Template (or Variation of a Section Template)?*
    • What help text would you like to provide for this field, if any?
    • If you'd like to use the response to this question to populate a variable in section templates, give it a name.
    • Inclusion criteria: Solicitation Types*; LPAs*; Categories
    • Permissions: Who typically answers this question?*
    • Timing: Should we ask this question right away or can it wait?*

  • Answer Details:
    • Does this answer allow for an open ended response?*
    • What's the answer?*
    • What additional help, if any, would you provide to other users to help them decide if this answer is right for them?



Admin: Best Practices

Use the Help Text to give your colleagues guidance how they should answer questions. Before adding new, check existing questions. This can help leverage your colleagues' work, and avoid cleanup efforts later. 

How Questions Work

Can you think of any documents or language in your organization's templates that is optional or situational, and shouldn't be used for all projects? Questions in Document Builder are designed to help automate this. This means that answering a question results in the system taking a subsequent action, based on the information you provide.


After someone answers a question in a solicitation, the system will either:
  1. Update smart fields/variables in your documents with the answer you provide, or
  2. Import situational documents and language based on the information you provided about your project.
All questions you see were custom configured for your organization by your Administrator colleagues. This article explains how teams can use questions.

Permissions

  1. Administrators create, manage, and answer questions for your organization.
  2. Owners / Editors will be responsible for overseeing and completing the list of questions in their solicitations.
  3. Guests can answer questions where permissions are allowed.
Administrators create questions and associate the questions with solicitation types, document templates, sections, and smart fields.
When a solicitation is created, Owners / Editors are provided a list of questions to answer. The answers to questions will either:
  1. Update smart fields in the documents
  2. Include or exclude situational templates/language
If the answer to a question is changed, either:
  1. All associated smart fields will be updated
  2. Exclude or include situational templates/language
When a user creates a project, Document Builder can ask a series of follow-up questions. These questions can serve one of two purposes:
  1. Inclusion criteria - The user’s answer to the question will help determine which document templates and section/subsection templates to include in the solicitation.
  2. Variables/Smart Fields - The user’s response will be used to pre-populate documents with key information. 
It is up to the system administrator to set up these questions.

Rules

The following rules apply when updating question templates on your Configuration Page.

  1. Action: Add new question
    Impact:

    1. To Existing Solicitations: automatically added if Inclusion Criteria match and status is "In Progress"; not added if Inclusion Criteria do not match or status is not "In Progress"

    2. To Future Solicitations: automatically added

  2. Action: Delete question
    Impact:

    1. To Configuration > question template: deleted and no longer accessible

    2. To Configuration > any conditional templates: change from dependent on “question” to “always include by default

    3. To Existing Solicitations

      1. question: deleted and no longer accessible

      2. conditional documents or sections: no change/impact

    4. To Future Solicitations: changes automatically applied

Admin: How to re-order questions

Questions are always asked in the order they appear in the Questions panel. Reorder the questions by dragging and dropping the rows of each question to the preferred order.



How to answer Project questions

Document Builder will provide a list of questions for you and your collaborators to answer. Answering these questions optimizes the solicitation process by triggering the creation of documents and auto-fill information.

Navigate to the Question Responses panel or the Table of Contents on your Solicitation page.



Click on a question to answer it. In the details panel that appears, fill in the information required to answer the question.

Answering Questions

A  list of all questions can be found on the solicitation details page. It's best practice to answer as many questions as you can at the start of your project to see the full list of documents and sections you are working with. However, you can answer questions at any time before you publish.
  1. Unanswered questions may risk leaving out a document, language, or key information about the project.
  2. If you are unable to confidently answer a question, open the question and click"Don’t Know?" to assign the question to another user. 
  3. Your answers to questions can always be changed, should you find that the initial responses were incorrect or no longer apply.
Owners and Editors may choose to grant Guest Contributors permission to answer questions.


Click ‘Save’ to submit the question response. After a question is answered, the system will either:
  • Update smart fields in your documents with the answer you provide
  • Insert language and documents
  • Exclude certain language and documents

If you are unable to confidently answer a question, open the question and assign the question to another collaborator.



To change the answer to a question, navigate to the Questions Panel, click ‘Edit’, and update the response.

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