Document control procedures for engineering

Document control procedures are a necessary part of document management. Without good document control engineering and document control, individuals piece together their own informal procedures which are sometimes okay individually, but a number at the scale of even a few people.

At the individual level, poor document control engineering results in:

• Inconsistent folder and file name conventions making simple tasks like finding documents extremely difficult
• Files are incorrectly moved or duplicated in multiple locations
• People adopt 'personal' copies of master documents which diverge from the master over time and create data collection issues

At the team and collaboration level, lacklustre document control engineering leads to wasted time and inefficient communication through things like:

• People asking other people to find documents for them
• People filling in unstandardised data which requires other team members to manually enter or manually reconcile data

Over time, documents become incredibly messy until the overhead and additional time people spend every day managing documents becomes 'normal' - when in reality it costs you millions of dollars and thousands of wasted hours.

The purpose of your document control procedures is to eliminate these issues from occurring. And what do you have to do to engineer great document controls?

1. Understand people's document requirements

Before you go about making strict document control engineering changes and processes, one of the most important things to do is to understand why people manage their documents the way they do.

Maybe there is a reason that someone manages their documents in their side drawers; maybe someone labels folders a specific way so that they can be found faster etc. etc.

You need to gather all of this information first in order to create document controls which work well for as many people as possible (some people might still be annoyed with any type of change or disruption). But understanding why people do what they do helps you to address these informalities in formal procedures and most importantly to communicate how the new document controls will be better.

2. Creating master templates

One of the most important elements of document control engineering is the master document or master templates.

Creating or identifying the masters can often require some coordination and back-and-froth with people and regulations, but establishing a master document which feeds every other document or form keeps all of your documents grounded and out of audit trouble.

Document management software is inherently very good at this parent-child relationship of document controls - which you can read more about below.

3. Identifying the important elements of your documents

Documents evolve and change over time as work evolves, regulations change etc. etc.

Because of this, a critical element of document control is to create processes around how often documents will be reviewed, updated, retired etc.

Your document controls and document control procedures need to create some guidelines for keeping your documents up-to-date and valid.

4. Create and write up procedures

Writing up document control procedures doesn't need to take huge amounts of time, in fact, often setting some basic rules and guidelines which are easy to follow can dramatically improve your document control.

The benefit of keeping your controls short and sharp is also that people find them easier to adopt and digest - and often simply to read them.

Document workflow diagrams can also really help here - so that people can visualise the document controls across the lifecycle of the document.

You may charge management with getting together to create these document controls, or you may have a designated document control engineer who creates and implements the controls.

5. Overcome resistance and monitor the document controls

Implementing change is not easy, and implementing change over activities and documents which people have done for many years can be extremely difficult.

Having a few champions during the roll-out process (people who have really bought in) goes a long way in implementation, but managing the roll-out requires oversight, with regular check-ins and feedback helping you create better document controls for everyone involved.

Your document control procedures are living and evolving, so you should always be open to improving and updating them.