Hoo boy, that's a tough one. One of my jobs is working for an ISO17043 accreditation provider so we have an ISO9001 QMS that all our docs sit on and every doc goes through an approval process, has a review date on it (6 months, 1 year, 3 years etc.), can have change requests, issues and non conformances logged against it, is included in audits and is written in a standard style.
We have a document controller who's job (not her entire job, but say 20% of her job) is just to ensure that documents are organised correctly, adhere to guidelines and are actually reviewed and updated when they are supposed to be (I.e. she will come and nag you if a document is overdue and you have been ignoring your notifications).
As part of the ordinary rhythm of business, metrics on how well we are doing on the document control front are produced and reviewed roughly every two months by a senior manager in a quality team meeting. If you don't keep up to date with your document control tasks it will be brought up in your appraisal (in a reasonable fashion, you might just have too many docs assigned to you).
There's other stuff, but let's just say document management is quite important to that business because procedures matter when getting them wrong kills people and / or leaves smoking holes in the ground.
Importantly the process of writing a doc is dead easy and anyone (literally, some of the most useful are written by the admin assistants and lab techs) can create one at any time. Theres a standard template and style guide, you write your doc, you choose an approval pathway, classify it and then submit it for approval. While it's waiting to be approved it sits in the drafts register with a warning on it saying not yet approved, but anyone can still access it.
In practice what happens is rather than writing a long email explaining how to do something you'll just write a doc, stick it in the QMS and give someone a link. Then when someone else needs to know that they can either find it themselves or you can just point them at it.
The admin overhead of the whole system is surprisingly small and means that we actually do have up to date documentation on most things.
>>There's other stuff, but let's just say document management is quite important to that business because procedures matter when getting them wrong kills people and / or leaves smoking holes in the ground.
If only other industries took matters as seriously, then an in-house writing culture would (should!) improve dramatically. Sounds like a necessary, yet still insufficient, requirement.
We have a document controller who's job (not her entire job, but say 20% of her job) is just to ensure that documents are organised correctly, adhere to guidelines and are actually reviewed and updated when they are supposed to be (I.e. she will come and nag you if a document is overdue and you have been ignoring your notifications).
As part of the ordinary rhythm of business, metrics on how well we are doing on the document control front are produced and reviewed roughly every two months by a senior manager in a quality team meeting. If you don't keep up to date with your document control tasks it will be brought up in your appraisal (in a reasonable fashion, you might just have too many docs assigned to you).
There's other stuff, but let's just say document management is quite important to that business because procedures matter when getting them wrong kills people and / or leaves smoking holes in the ground.
Importantly the process of writing a doc is dead easy and anyone (literally, some of the most useful are written by the admin assistants and lab techs) can create one at any time. Theres a standard template and style guide, you write your doc, you choose an approval pathway, classify it and then submit it for approval. While it's waiting to be approved it sits in the drafts register with a warning on it saying not yet approved, but anyone can still access it.
In practice what happens is rather than writing a long email explaining how to do something you'll just write a doc, stick it in the QMS and give someone a link. Then when someone else needs to know that they can either find it themselves or you can just point them at it.
The admin overhead of the whole system is surprisingly small and means that we actually do have up to date documentation on most things.