Policy Experts / The library

Templates, frameworks and bought policy sets

They solve the blank page and create a different problem.

Purchased or templated policy sets are widely used and are a reasonable starting point, particularly for a small organisation that must have a library and cannot write one from nothing. They arrive complete, professionally drafted and internally consistent.

The problem is that they describe a generic organisation. Adopted without adaptation they promise processes the organisation does not have, name roles it does not employ, and commit to timeframes nobody has assessed. The library is then compliant in appearance and inaccurate in every particular, which is the worst combination.

Adaptation is the work and it is the part most often skipped, because it requires exactly the knowledge of actual practice that the purchase was intended to substitute for. A realistic approach is to adopt a small subset properly rather than the whole set nominally.

The tell is easy to spot from outside: role titles that appear nowhere on the organisation chart, references to committees that do not meet, and a house style that differs from everything else the organisation produces.

The other tell in a templated set is internal cross-reference. Purchased libraries reference each other by title, and where an organisation adopts only part of the set those references point at documents that do not exist. It is a small thing and it signals to any reader that the set was adopted rather than authored, which affects how the whole library is regarded.