Design Policy Management Lifecycle

---
name: design-policy-management-lifecycle
description: Use when an organization's internal policies accumulate without a defined process for creating, approving, reviewing, and retiring them — establishing a formal policy lifecycle with an accountable owner, a defined review cadence, and a single authoritative repository, rather than letting policies proliferate as scattered documents with no owner and no scheduled review.
source: ISO 9001:2015, documented information control requirements
tags: [business, operations, policy-management, governance, documentation-control, organizational-clarity]
related: [design-committee-charter-framework, design-conflict-of-interest-policy, design-honest-record-keeping]
---

# Design Policy Management Lifecycle

Establish a formal policy lifecycle — with an accountable owner for each policy, a defined review cadence, and a single authoritative repository — rather than letting policies proliferate as scattered documents with no owner and no scheduled review.

## Why This Is Best Practice

**Adopted by:** ISO 9001:2015's documented information control requirements establish formal expectations for creating, reviewing, approving, and maintaining organizational policy documents as part of a certified quality management system, and formal policy lifecycle management is standard practice across organizations maintaining ISO certification or similar structured governance requirements.
**Impact:** Organizations without a formal policy lifecycle are documented to accumulate outdated, contradictory, or unowned policies over time — a policy written years ago by someone no longer at the company, referencing a process that no longer exists, sitting alongside a newer policy that contradicts it — because no defined process exists for retiring or updating policies as circumstances change.
**Why best:** A policy created once and never revisited tends to become stale as the organization and its circumstances evolve, and without a defined owner, no one is specifically responsible for noticing this staleness or updating the policy — a formal lifecycle with assigned ownership and a scheduled review cadence is what actually keeps policies current rather than allowing them to silently drift out of relevance.

Sources: International Organization for Standardization, ISO 9001:2015, "Quality Management Systems — Requirements," documented information control clauses

## Steps

### Step 1: Establish a single authoritative policy repository

Establish a single, authoritative repository where all official organizational policies live, so that employees and managers have one place to find the current, correct version of any policy — rather than scattered, potentially conflicting versions living in different documents, folders, or communication channels.

### Step 2: Assign an accountable owner to each policy

Assign a specific, named owner to each policy — typically the functional leader whose area the policy governs — responsible for that policy's ongoing accuracy and relevance, rather than leaving policies unowned once initially published.

### Step 3: Define an approval process before a policy takes effect

Define a required approval process before a new or materially revised policy takes effect — who must review and sign off before publication — so that policies reflect genuine organizational decision-making rather than being published unilaterally by whoever drafted them.

### Step 4: Establish a scheduled review cadence for every policy

Establish a defined review cadence (e.g., annually) for every policy in the repository, requiring the accountable owner to confirm the policy remains accurate and relevant or update it — rather than leaving policies to persist indefinitely without any scheduled re-examination.

### Step 5: Define a retirement process for outdated policies

Define an explicit process for retiring policies that are no longer relevant — formally marking them as retired in the repository rather than simply deleting them (preserving the historical record) or, worse, leaving them silently in place where they might be mistaken for current guidance.

## Rules

- Maintain a single, authoritative policy repository — never allow policies to exist as scattered, potentially conflicting documents across different locations.
- Assign a specific, named accountable owner to every policy — an unowned policy tends to go unreviewed and unrevised as circumstances change.
- Require a defined approval process before a policy takes effect, and a scheduled review cadence for every existing policy.
- Formally retire outdated policies through a defined process — don't leave them silently in place where they could be mistaken for current guidance.

## Examples

**Scheduled review catching a stale policy:** An organization's annual policy review cycle surfaces a remote-work policy last updated three years ago that references an office location the company has since closed. The accountable owner updates the policy to reflect current circumstances — a staleness issue a policy with no scheduled review would have left unaddressed indefinitely.

**Single repository preventing a conflicting-document problem:** A new employee finds two different versions of the expense reimbursement policy — one in a shared drive folder, one attached to an old email — with conflicting reimbursement thresholds. After the organization consolidates to a single authoritative repository, this kind of conflicting-document confusion becomes structurally impossible, since only one current version of any policy exists.

## Common Mistakes

- **Allowing policies to exist as scattered documents across multiple locations with no single authoritative source** — this produces exactly the conflicting-version confusion a single repository is designed to prevent.
- **Publishing policies with no assigned accountable owner** — an unowned policy has no one specifically responsible for noticing it's become outdated or inaccurate.
- **Setting no scheduled review cadence, leaving policies to persist indefinitely without re-examination** — policies drift out of relevance as organizational circumstances change, and only a scheduled review catches this drift.
- **Deleting outdated policies rather than formally retiring them through a defined process** — deletion loses the historical record, while an undefined retirement process risks a policy staying in place and being mistaken for current guidance.

## When NOT to Use

- For a very small organization with few formal policies, where a lighter, less formal approach to policy maintenance may be proportionate to actual organizational complexity.
- For genuinely temporary or project-specific guidance not intended as a standing organizational policy — reserve the formal lifecycle for actual standing policies, not one-off project documentation.
- As a substitute for the actual substantive content of a specific policy area — this practice governs the lifecycle process itself; the specific content of, for example, a conflict-of-interest policy is a separate, substantive question (see `design-conflict-of-interest-policy`).