Policy Experts / Keeping

The review cycle that reviews nothing

Annual review is usually annual re-dating.

Policies carry a review date and are reviewed on it, which in practice means somebody opens the document, changes the date, and records that a review occurred. Nothing in the process requires anybody to check whether the document still describes the operation, and nothing prompts them to ask the people doing the work.

This is not laziness. A genuine review requires knowing what the current practice is, which requires asking, which requires time nobody has allocated for a document nobody has complained about. The cheapest compliant action is re-dating, and the system rewards it identically.

Making review meaningful requires it to produce a decision rather than a date. The minimum useful form is a question put to the person who owns the process: has anything changed, and does this still describe what you do. A one-line answer either confirms the document or triggers real work, and it takes minutes.

It also helps to stagger reviews by risk rather than by calendar. A library where everything is reviewed annually spends the same effort on the document governing a critical process as on the one about meeting room bookings, which guarantees that neither receives real attention.

A useful refinement is to attach the review to something that happens anyway. Reviewing the procedure at the point the process changes, or when a new person takes the role over, catches drift when it occurs rather than on an arbitrary date. Calendar review will always be performed by somebody with no particular reason to look, which is why it becomes re-dating.