Documentation / QueryTek Review glossary / Document Lifecycle
Document lifecycle is the set of states a document moves through from arrival to disposition, and the rules governing each transition. It answers what may happen to a document now, who may cause it, and what evidence the change leaves behind.
A lifecycle is useful only if the states are meaningful and exclusive — a document is in exactly one, and knowing which one tells you what can happen next. States such as draft, in review, returned, approved, and archived carry that information; a general "active" status does not.
Three rules make the model hold.
Transitions are constrained. Not every state follows every other. Material cannot be approved without having been reviewed, and a returned document re-enters review rather than skipping to approval. Constrained transitions are what make the state meaningful rather than decorative.
Transitions are attributable. Every change records who caused it and when. A document that reached approved with no record of who approved it has a state but no accountability, which is the same problem as having no state.
Terminal states are real. Archived and disposed are not synonyms for inactive. They carry retention consequences: what remains retrievable, for how long, and what happens at the end of that period.
The lifecycle and the review cycle are related but distinct. The review cycle is the process a review pass follows; the lifecycle is the document's own trajectory, which may include several review cycles. A document returned and resubmitted moves through the review cycle twice within one lifecycle.
Because each transition is recorded, the lifecycle is also the backbone of the audit trail — the sequence that lets someone reconstruct a document's history without relying on anyone's recollection.
Ambiguous status is where review programs lose control. When "in progress" covers everything from awaiting assignment to awaiting client response, nobody can say what is actually blocked.
Explicit states also make retention tractable. Retention obligations attach to disposition, and a lifecycle without real terminal states cannot express them.
QueryTek Review tracks documents through explicit states with attributable transitions, so a document's history can be reconstructed from the record. State machines and configuration detail are not published; retention periods are established contractually.
