Who Is Holding the Baton? Getting Document Ownership Right Before You Automate

In a relay race the runners are rarely the problem. Races are lost at the hand-over, when the baton is dropped or nobody is sure who should be holding it. Document reviews fail the same way. A policy sits in a SharePoint library, the review date passes, and everyone assumes someone else has it.

Automation cannot fix that on its own. A workflow will happily send an approval request to someone who left six months ago. Before building anything, there are some questions worth answering.

Who owns each document? One named person, not a team or a department.

Who approves it, and who covers when they are away? A workflow needs a deputy, or it stalls every summer.

Who can read it, who can edit it and who can only comment? Think of key cards in an office. Everyone gets through the front door, but not everyone gets into the server room.

How often is it reviewed, and what should trigger an early review? A fixed date is a start, but a restructure or a new system is a reason to look sooner.

What evidence needs to be kept, and for how long? Your wider compliance obligations decide this, and it is much easier to know before the first review than after.

These questions look administrative, but they are design decisions. The answers determine how approvals are routed, who is asked to review what, and what the management dashboard shows. Skipping them is like programming a sat-nav before you know where anyone lives.

The encouraging part is that most organisations already know most of the answers. They have just never been written down in one place. A short working session with the people involved is a good way to pull them together.

Once ownership is clear, the automation has something solid to work with. Approvals reach the right person, discussions stay with the document, and a central dashboard shows who owns each policy, what is waiting for review and where things have got stuck. You can see who is holding the baton at any moment. Have a read of our blog "Written, Filed and Forgotten? Fixing Your Document Review Process with Power Platform Automation".

If you would like help working through these questions for your own documents, we can look at your current processes and design a solution around them. Drop us a line at our enquiries page or join us on LinkedIn.