Hi, all !

Recently, we had a change in our MD. The new MD make changes in the organization chart. Changes was mostly in department/section name. Function remains the same.

Some Department become Section, and Section becomes Unit. (more like a demotion :) )

The problem I faced is in term of documentation. The current document have been using all the old department/section names. It seems that there is no other way except to update all the documents. Or is there an alternative? Or maybe there are some methods that I can use to avoid revising the document if in the future this organization chart change again?

(Note : we change our MD every 5 years)

You could try to publish a change sheet whereby you explain the new names.
This then becomes part of the documentation and thus you do not need to change the individual references.

I have had auditor pick up that documents still referred to old job titles/dept names before. We at that time had in place a document similar to what Howard described and the relevant staff were still aware that the documents were relevant to them. The auditor was happy with this, we just changed the names of job titles/departments as the documents were updated for other reasons.

We had the same problem with a lot of department name and function title changes.

We changed our Quality Manual to reference the organization chart and the procedures to list functions rather than titles.

A department name or job title may change but the function usually remains the same.

Send a memo to the President documenting the changes and keep it on file. Have used this approach many times, and I just fix it during the next document update.