10   Maintaining Manuals

It’s never too early to start thinking about how your manual is going to be maintained. Too many organizations stop thinking about a manual once it’s finished and allow it to go out of date. The result is a manual that’s unreliable and unused. Manuals need to be updated regularly to reflect new legislation, accommodate program changes, or correct content errors. Think of manuals as going through two phases: the development phase and the maintenance phase.

In this chapter, we’ll discuss the maintenance phase and cover the following:

• role of the manual
• responsibility for revisions
• how often to revise
• why it’s best to revise whole sections instead of single pages
• contents of update packages
• updating online manuals
• documenting your update procedures
• training staff on updating procedures