Time to Review your Policies?

Ideally, all of the documents in your management system would be used every day, and the need for change would be noticed and made immediately. In this world, you would never need to schedule the review of a document. While it may be true for Forms and Work Instructions in active use, it’s much less likely to be the case for Policies and system procedures.

One approach is to set a review date for each and every document in your management system, based on the date it was last updated or reviewed. QSToolbox lets you set a due date for each document.

It is fine to have different review periods for different documents. Use a risk-based approach with more important, changeable or higher risk process documents reviewed more frequently.

You might prefer to review a whole bunch of procedures together at the same time.

Take a process-based approach and review all of the documents connected to a particular process at one time. This might make sense to do as part of your internal audit for that process area.

You could schedule reviews by document type on a specific date, e.g., review all 'Codes of Practice' on March 10th. In that case, create and assign a Task in QSToolbox.

For policies, it would make sense to include it as part of your management review process, since both are a top management responsibility and reviewing your Quality Policy is already a required part of Management Review in the ISO 9001 standard.

In QSToolbox, get a list from the Document module using the search options to give you all “Polices”.

You can also search the Documents register in QSToolbox by Revision Date to find documents that haven't changed in a while.

Lots of options. Do what works for you!