Policy Experts / Keeping

Version control is not a footer

The question is which version was in force on a given day.

Most policy libraries record a version number and a date of last review in a footer, and that is treated as version control. It answers what the current version is and cannot answer the question that actually arises, which is what the policy said on the day something happened.

That question comes up whenever conduct is assessed after the fact: a complaint, an incident, an audit of a past period. Being unable to produce the version in force at the time means being unable to demonstrate that the person followed the rules, even where they did, and it converts a defensible position into an unprovable one.

Retaining superseded versions solves it and costs almost nothing. The requirement is that each is dated with the period it applied, kept somewhere findable, and not editable. A document management system does this automatically; a shared folder does not, and a shared folder is where most policy libraries actually live.

The related discipline is recording what changed and why alongside each version. A change log of one line per revision answers most of the questions that arise later, and it is the artefact most consistently absent from libraries that are otherwise well maintained.

The other benefit of retaining superseded versions is that it makes change visible over time. Reading a document's history shows what the organisation kept adding after each incident, and the accumulation is frequently the explanation for why the current version is unusable. That history is invisible when only the latest version exists, and it is the most direct evidence of how a library became what it is.