Policy Experts / Keeping

Approval, and who is actually accountable

A signature at the bottom is not the same as ownership.

Policies are approved by a committee, a director or a board, and the approval is recorded. What is frequently unclear afterwards is who owns the document: who is responsible for it describing reality, who decides when it needs to change, and who answers when it is not followed.

Approval and ownership are different functions and separating them explicitly resolves a great deal of confusion. The approver takes responsibility for the organisation adopting this position. The owner takes responsibility for it remaining accurate and being implemented, which is continuous work rather than a decision.

Ownership should sit with the person who runs the process, not with the quality or compliance function, however tempting the alternative is administratively. A compliance owner produces documents that are well maintained and describe an operation they do not run, which is exactly how the gap between document and practice forms.

Where ownership genuinely cannot be assigned, that is a signal worth heeding. A policy nobody will own is usually a policy governing something nobody is actually accountable for, and writing it does not create the accountability.

It is worth adding that an owner needs the authority to say no. A document owner who cannot decline a requested addition will accumulate every suggestion anybody makes, and the document grows until it is unusable while remaining formally well maintained. The ability to say that something does not belong in this document is the substance of ownership, and it is rarely granted explicitly.