The structure of your documentation should follow the structure of your organization. It's usually a mistake to force your documentation into someone else's mould (such as by trying to follow the set of headings in ISO 9000).

The structure of your organization - the hierarchy of processes, production units, departments, or divisions - is meaningful to the people in the organization and (presumably) has an internal logic according to your organization's objectives. Your documentation should follow the same logic, for these reasons -

• The amount of documentation needed by any one person or department is minimized. Readers don't have to look in several places to find everything relevant to what they want to do.

• The relations between procedures are made clear. Readers can see how their activities contribute to higher-level procedures and to the performance of the organization as a whole.

• The completeness and consistency of the documentation is easy to assess: you can see if there are steps missing or steps duplicated between procedures.

• Readers at any level in the organization can view the documentation at the appropriate level of detail.

• The documentation is modular, so processes can be changed (improved continually!) without causing ripple-effect changes to other documents.