Document Control
Modelled on how ISO 9001 and ISO 19650 shops actually run. The test of a document-control system is not whether documents exist — it is whether you can answer “where is the controlled copy, and who approved it?” without asking anyone.
The four roles
| Role | Responsibility |
|---|---|
| Author | drafts and revises |
| Reviewer | checks technical content |
| Approver | authorises issue; the only role that can move a doc to active |
| Custodian | owns numbering, distribution and the retention schedule |
Separating author from approver is the whole point. One person doing both is not a control.
Lifecycle
draft → review → approved → issued → superseded → obsolete
superseded and obsolete are not deletions. A controlled document that
vanishes cannot be audited — it is replaced, and the record says by what.
Numbering
PREFIX-TYPE-NNNN, and numbers are never reused. Reusing a number is how
two different documents end up cited by the same reference in two contracts.
Examples in this vault: SOP-001, RISK-002, ADR-001, RUNBOOK-001.
Review dates are the live part
Every controlled document carries review_date in its frontmatter. That single
property is what makes the process observable rather than aspirational — the
sop-health dashboard sorts by it and shows a days_to_review countdown, so an
overdue procedure is visible rather than merely overdue.
A document with no review_date is not controlled; it is just a file.
Which dashboards read this
| Dashboard | Shows |
|---|---|
compliance-register | every controlled document: #compliance, plus all SOPs and decisions |
sop-health | procedures sorted by soonest review, with the countdown |
decision-log | ADR-style decisions and their status |
risk-register | open risks by owner and status |
All four exclude templates, so a prototype never appears as a real record.
The minimum frontmatter
type: sop
owner: media.ops # the custodian
status: active # lifecycle state
division: media
review_date: 2027-05-07 # the control that makes this auditableSee also: GUIDE-secure-sharing for granting a reviewer access to exactly one department.