Documentation Standards
Naming, versioning, ownership and review cycles — the four rules that decide whether documentation survives its first year.
Documentation doesn't fail because it was written badly. It fails because nobody decided who owns it or when it gets checked.
Four decisions. Make them once, apply them everywhere.
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How do we name documents?
Name for what someone will search for, not for how you'd file it.
Nobody searches for "Process Documentation." They search for "refund" or "new starter" or "invoice."
The rules
| Rule | Example |
|---|---|
| Procedures start with a verb | Processing a refund |
| Reference pages state the subject | Refund policy thresholds |
| Sentence case, not Title Case | How to onboard a new client |
| No version numbers in titles | not Onboarding v3 FINAL |
| No dates in titles, except for events | not Onboarding 2026 |
| Under sixty characters | so it's readable in a list |
Numbering
Procedures get a number: SOP-01, SOP-02. Sequential by creation, never reused, never renumbered.
The number is an identifier, not a category. Resist the urge to make SOP-2xx mean finance — that scheme always breaks when a process belongs to two areas.
How do we write SOPs?
Covered in full in Building Your First SOP. The standard in short:
Ten parts: purpose, trigger, inputs, roles, steps, decisions, exceptions, output, verification, owner and version.
Steps are imperative and name a tool. "Open the orders report — CRM, Reports tab." Not "orders are reviewed."
Decisions are rules, not judgement. Every "it depends" becomes a condition with a threshold, or is marked as requiring a named person's judgement.
Verification is checkable by the executor. Specific conditions they can see, not "ensure it's correct."
Nothing is finished until someone else has followed it while the author watched without helping.
How do we update documentation?
Versioning
Keep it simple. Two numbers.
- Minor (1.0 → 1.1): wording, clarification, a corrected detail
- Major (1.1 → 2.0): the process itself changed
Shown at the bottom of every document, with the date.
You don't need a changelog for most documents. You need the version, the date, and the owner, visible without clicking anything.
Ownership
One named person per document. Not a team, not a role title that nobody currently holds.
The owner is responsible for three things: that it's accurate, that it gets reviewed on schedule, and that it gets archived when the process ends.
When someone leaves, reassigning their documents is part of the handover. A document whose owner has left is the most common kind of stale page.
Review cycle
| Document type | Review every |
|---|---|
| Procedures for frequent processes | 6 months |
| Procedures touching tools that update often | 3 months |
| Reference material and standards | 12 months |
| Anything with legal or compliance weight | 12 months, with sign-off |
The review date is set when the document is written. A document with no next review date is a document nobody has committed to maintaining.
A review is not a rewrite. Three questions: is this still accurate, is it still used, does it still have the right owner. Most reviews take five minutes and end with a new date.
Changing a document
Anyone who spots an error should be able to correct it. If fixing a typo requires a request to someone, errors will stay.
The exceptions are documents with compliance weight — those need the approval step, and that's a deliberate trade-off rather than an oversight.
Retiring a document
When a process ends, archive the procedure. Don't delete it and don't leave it in place.
Archived means: moved out of the main space, marked clearly, still searchable. Someone will need to know how this used to work.
One home per fact
The rule underneath all four standards.
Every piece of information lives in exactly one place. Everywhere else links to it.
The moment the same rule appears on two pages, they begin to diverge. Within months you have two answers and no way to tell which is current — and that's the point at which people stop trusting documentation and go back to asking a person.
Copying is always easier in the moment. That's why this is the hardest standard to hold and the most important one.
The minimum header
Every document carries this, visible without clicking:
Owner: [name]
Version: [number]
Last reviewed: [date]
Next review: [date]
Four lines. They're what let a reader judge how much to trust what follows, and they're what makes the review cycle possible at all.
Documentation without an owner is accurate on the day it was written. Documentation without a review date is accurate for about three months.
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