Resetting technical document control
At a specialist contractor (name withheld), procedures, templates and site guidance were spread across personal drives, OneDrive and inherited folders.
- Sector
- Specialist contractors
- Services
- Technical documentation
- Systems audits
- Training and capability
The situation
- 01 Teams could not reliably tell which version was approved for a task.
- 02 Near-duplicate files held useful detail but had no review history.
- 03 Documents belonged to whoever wrote them, with no named role responsible for keeping them current.
- 04 Site guidance followed the folder structure more than the conditions it was used in.
We sorted documents by the job they support
We grouped the material by the task, decision or evidence it supports. With the people who know the work, we decided what was still authoritative, what held knowledge worth keeping and what should be withdrawn. We agreed who owns each document and how often it is reviewed before moving any files.
- 01 Purpose and audience of each document
- 02 Source, owner and approval state
- 03 Duplicates and conflicting guidance
- 04 Where it is used: site, office or supervision
We set up a publishing route people can maintain
We rewrote the priority guidance around real tasks and published it in a simple structure that shows who is responsible for each document, who approved it and what changed.
Authors, reviewers and users practised the publishing flow together, so keeping documents current became part of normal work instead of an occasional clean-up.
What the work achieved
- Duplicate and superseded files
- 200+ removed
- More than 200 duplicate and superseded files removed, leaving a single controlled set of current guidance.
- Confirming approved version
- Chain → 1 lookup
- Confirming the approved version of a procedure dropped from a multi-person email chain to a single lookup.
- Guidance review cycle
- Weeks → <5 days
- Review and approval for updated guidance shortened from several weeks to under five working days.
More case studies
The sector
Related services
Related insights
Book a systems audit
We look at how the work runs today and give you a 90-day improvement plan.