The policy management process is drawn the same way everywhere: draft, review, approve, publish, communicate, review again. The drawing is not the problem. Two of the six steps reliably get skipped in real organisations, and they are the same two everywhere, which makes them worth naming. This page walks the six and says what skipping the two costs, using this site's own worked register as the arithmetic.
Draft and review, which happen
Somebody writes it and somebody reads it. These two are never the bottleneck, because they are the visible part of the work and there is usually a person motivated to finish them. The commonest fault here is a draft written by somebody who does not do the job, which produces a document that is technically correct and useless.
Approve and publish, which mostly happen
The approval is a decision by whoever is accountable, and publishing is putting it where people look. The fault here is requiring too senior an approver for a procedure change, which is the fastest way to make updates stop: the person who noticed the document was wrong will not chase a director twice.
Skipped one: communicate, with evidence
Publishing is not communicating. An email sent once to a distribution list is not a record of who read what, and it is the difference between a procedure the organisation follows and a document it merely owns. On the worked example a full attestation cycle is 1,152 signatures and $6,566.40 of reading time, which is a real cost and the reason it gets skipped.
Skipped two: review again, on a date somebody set
The second review is the step with no deadline pressure behind it, so it waits, and the register quietly goes stale. On the worked example 30% of 48 procedures are already past their date: 14.4 documents and 36 hours of work to clear. Turning the annual panic into ten hours a month is the whole discipline.
Questions people ask about policy management process
Which steps get skipped?
Communicating with evidence, and the second review. Both are the steps with no deadline pressure behind them.
Who should approve a procedure?
Whoever is accountable for the work. Requiring a director for a procedure change is the fastest way to stop updates happening.
How much does the review step cost?
On the worked example, 48 procedures at one 2.5-hour review each is 120 hours and $6,600 a year, or about ten hours a month.