10   Maintaining Manuals

Frequency of Revisions

Timely maintenance of the manual is essential to its usefulness. Ideally, its contents should be updated as soon as the need for a change is identified. While updating on an ongoing basis gets revisions out faster than periodic updates, it’s also more work.

As a backup to ongoing maintenance, manuals can be reviewed periodically (at least annually) to reaffirm the accuracy and appropriateness of their contents. Ideally, every section should be reviewed. If this is too much effort, critical sections, or those that are considered likely to have changed, should be reviewed. The review need not be formal, but could simply be setting aside some time with key staff to read through and verify the accuracy of the selected sections.

Organizations that update their manuals periodically sometimes have to issue bulletins or memos before the manual is revised to inform staff of the operational change. The bulletin or memo is then followed a few months later with the revised section of the manual. The efficiency of batching updates is then lost because of the additional effort in issuing a bulletin or memo as well. In many cases it’s better to revise the manual immediately and save the extra effort.