I manage quality for technical, expertise-driven editorial products and services (so we have workflows similar to typical editorial workflows, but with multiple added steps for authoring and review by subject matter experts and technical editors, as well). We produce content that can impact people’s health, so managing the risk of publishing an error is … important.

You can manage very complex content creation processes so long as you can identify risks for errors and design the process to (a) avoid overloading any given step and (b) include additional reviews of anything requiring interpretation or judgment. But in principle it is a mistake to try to use process to mitigate against someone simply failing to adequately complete a particular step in the process, because then you are building in perpetual inefficiencies (which few businesses can afford). Once you have a process that works reliably so long as the people in it perform within the expected tolerances, you want to manage the project by making sure you have the right people in each role, managing them well, and making sure they continue to perform (or you identify it quickly if they don’t), much like you do in any other part of a business’s operations.

That said, I really like the Reader’s Council thought experiment. Possibly, a business could build a council of readers, including the software infrastructure, and offer their reviews as a service to multiple publications, even.