My day job is adopting the ISO 9001:2015 (quality) and 14001:2015 (environmental) standards this year.  The biggest change, at least as far as I’m concerned, is that they require less documented procedures.  With the prior standards, you had to have a manual, as well as documents for training, documents (how meta can you get?), records, nonconformances, and so on.  Now you don’t.

My coworker was horrified as my boss and I discussed some of our existing documents and decided that we didn’t need them.  “I don’t see how you can be so calm about getting rid of them after all the work you did on them.”

That was a tough thing to explain.  Yes, I’d done a lot of work on them over the past four years, and I was proud of them.  At the same time, they were something I’d created specifically for my job as Document Control Specialist.  They weren’t mine.  They weren’t things I would have created on my own.  Save for the experience of creating them, and thus having learnt what to take into consideration if I ever need to write such a procedure again, they are documents that I can’t use elsewhere.  They are not my darlings, so it is easy for me to let them fade away.

Besides which, it’s my job to make documents for the day job.  I get paid for that, whatever they decide to do with them.  There’s not a huge sting if someone hates what I’ve created, or suggests vast revisions.  It’s easy for me to send out a procedure and solicit feedback.  It’s so much easier to fix things in the draft stage then after it’s been finalized and uploaded to our management software.

It’s easy to overlook the fact that the documents still exist.  That I did gain through the doing – it doesn’t matter that they’re no longer used.  They served their purpose well, and taught me along the way.