Effective Change Control

Change comes from many sources. Allow employees to submit proposed changes to documentation in the system for any reason. Let your HR manual or employee handbook evolve with input from those that use it most.

Optional Change Control

Require changes to be approved by interested parties, or not as required.

Record Change Requests

All requests are recorded, along with their status, and reasons behind decisions.

Track Progress

Determine where a change request is in the approval process.

Document Change Control

The need for change

Almost all documentation is subject to change over time. These changes can come from many sources, both internal and external. Often, the people performing the processes or carrying out the procedures vital to your business success are drivers of these changes.

Their day-to-day experience with a particular process or procedure will mean they often identify inefficiencies or dangers, or conversely improvements or shortcuts.

Other changes can come from changes to underlying regulation or legislation, or just a periodic review that has identified a need for change. Some types of document have a requirement to revisit the content regularly, for others regular review is simply a best practice, for example things like health and safety risk assessments.

With the many sources of change, it can be essential to control documents via some process so interested parties can be confident the information within the document is adequate for it’s intended purpose. When we control a document via some process, the document becomes known as a “controlled document”.

What is a controlled document?

Simply put, a controlled document is one that must transition through a formal process for various stages in it’s lifecycle. Before a document can be distributed it must be approved, once a document is approved, it must be reviewed periodically. When a document is updated or modified, that update or modification must be approved. When a document is deleted, that deletion must be approved also. It’s all about ensuring the information within the document remains adequate for it’s intended purpose.

The common name for the processes described above is document change control, or a document change control process. The people who administer this process are usually called document controllers. In addition to the approval or rejection at various stages of a document lifecycle, there are other factors that need consideration.

What is Document Change Control?

Document change control is a process that controls aspects of a documents life cycle such that the information within those documents can be used by concerned parties with confidence.

Essential elements of a change control process are
Approval of documents, such that they are validated as adequate before issuing them to, or allowing use by relevant parties.
Regular periodic reviews of documentation to ensure that the information within is still relevant and fit for purpose.
Ability for the end user of a document to understand what has changed between the various issues and revisions of the same document.
Ensuring the current, most recent version of any document is always the one that is available for use.
Identification of the documents, clearly legible such that they can be easily referenced.
Distribution of documents within, and in some case outside the organisation, in some cases acknowledging receipt that a document is available. This can include documentation that comes from other external organisations, suppliers, contractors, manufacturers.

Why Document Change Control?

Regardless of the underlying source of a proposed change, some of these changes may be to procedures or policy that are controlled by legal or regulatory requirements, or just so important that you need a manner of control before any changes are made. This is where document change control can help.

Traditional change control involves paper forms wandering around for approval signatures, in some cases emails are pinging around, and things can get, well, messy. We can help implement effective change control with a full online, in system change control procedure.

By ensuring employees are able to suggest changes to documentation, and ensuring those suggested changes are properly recorded, before being approved or denied by appropriate people, you create a system of controlled change, where everything is logged.

Benefits of Document Control

Recording the approval or rejection along with the reasons, and ensuring those records are visible as part of a document’s history, helps everyone understand the why as well as the how. Users can view the history, any change requests submitted as part of the history, and the reasons for the change.

Change Approval Bottlenecks

As with a manual change control process, bottlenecks can occur whilst waiting for decisions. A document needs to be approved by the Quality Assurance Manager, but the Quality Assurance Manager is on leave. This can result in overly long approval bottlenecks.

Our solution allows for delegates who can action the change request, where appropriate, in the manager’s absence. The system will also record the person who was responsible for the change request approval, and the person who actually performed it.

External Factors

In some industries, external approval is required before a certain procedure or other critical piece of information is modified. The company manual solution allows you to identify these cases so proposers of changes are aware, and those responsible for approving or rejecting the change can ensure that the regulatory or legislative framework governing the change is adhered to.

How our solution helps

Full, online change control process – Where required, a user can propose a new document, a change to an existing document, or even the removal of an obsolete document. A user proposing a change can see at a glance where the approval or rejection of that change is up to, and an approver can see the input of others involved in the approval chain, therefore everybody knows where the changes are at any given time.

Regular periodic reviews – ensure documentation is reviewed.

Full Change history – see what changed, when, why and how the change was initiated.

Ensure the current version of a document is always available.

Auto deletion and archival – remove documentation after a set period of time, or move it to an archive.

Update notifications, acknowledge updates to important information with our read and sign solution, even gather feedback.

We offer a feature rich solution allowing you to implement an effective online document change control process.

Additional Benefits of Document Control

The obvious benefits of document control are being able to view what changed, when it changed, who initiated the change, and why it changed. Similarly, being able to view rejected changes can help understand previous decisions.

There are also other benefits that may not be so obvious. We can give you the tools to understand what changes the most, and why, we can help you understand the sources of those changes, and even understand the individuals who are contributing positively by suggesting changes that improve process or update policy.

Opt in or out of change control for minor changes.

Of course, a formal change control procedure is only relevant for areas where that level of control is required. Our solution allows for selective change control, allowing tightly controlled changes, or little to no control over changes, as required, based on your specific need. Other cases arise where the fundamental content of a document hasn’t changed, a change could be a simple typographical correction. For these scenarios we offer quickedit solutions, all of course fully logged and visible in the document’s history.

Issues and Revisions

Issue numbers

Any document subject to change should have an issue number and issue date associated with it, this clearly shows a version and date of issue, or effective date the information within came into being.

Our solution supports issue numbers and also revision numbers, in some industries it is common to use issue number and dates for larger changes, and revision numbers and dates for smaller changes. We support both which can be used as required.

Document Identifiers

We also support document identifiers, this allows you to associate an id with a document. This is a common approach in many industries and allows you to associate identifiers that make sense to you with your documents, for example, your HR procedures might start at HR-001 and go through to HR-999.

This aids communication but also aids segmentation, you can create very specific documents and refer to them from others, or ask someone to fill in a “567 Form” rather than a “request for absence due to jury service form”. Indeed in many businesses the identifier is used in place of the actual purpose of the form taking it’s place in the terminology used by the workforce.

Another key aspect of identifiers relates to the change process, if a document is being revised and it’s referred to from several others, should those “several others” also be reviewed to ensure the reference is still valid?

Our solution allows you to establish these relationships so you can identify related documentation at time of change and ensure nothing slips through the net.