atw: Your thoughts on documentation maintenance?

Greetings All,

I am getting quite a few enquiries from clients on how they ensure that
their documentation is kept up to date.  Particularly in relation to
procedures and instructions.

When I build a procedural template, I always put a description or prompt
in that asks the reader to have the document updated if they find
anything wrong (and how to go about getting the document updated).
After a while these sort of messages get ignored - a bit like
advertising and images on web sites.

I also advise people to have regular reviews and consider putting expiry
dates on their documentation.  When the review or expiry date arrives
the owner should look over the document and make any changes needed or
remove it from circulation. This sounds fine in theory, but the
scheduled reviews are often ignored because other work is more important
and without an automated system to prompt about expiry dates they often
pass unnoticed.

I'm curious to know if anyone has had any success in getting owners to
keep their documentation up to date and how you achieved it?

           _
          (_)         MERRY CHRISTMAS!
          / \
         /   \        Deborah Cross
        /_____\       Enterprise Systems Program
      (`_______`)     Division of Information
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      (/(__O__)\)     The Australian National University
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   {__}###[_]###{__}  E-mail: deborah.cross@xxxxxxxxxx
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