Document Planning Checklist

Document Planning Checklist is created for company managers who would like to establish new specific
kind of documents for internal company use or just to collect information for ordinary documents. This
checklist includes points that should be considered in order to plan document's purposes, content, use and
roles.

Defining document general parameters:

 Determine what type of document it is

Organizational document, order, informational document etc.

 Determine purposes of document

 Define if it is primary document or secondary document
 Define if it is short-term or long-term document
 Define what medium will be used to transmit document to audience

Defining document roles:

 Define document's owner

 Define document's user

Who will use information that document contains?

 Define document's author

Who will put data into document?

 Define document's supervisor/reviewer

Who will control content of the document?

 Define if document needs to be shared among team of authors

 Define if document needs to be shared among team of users
 Define ways how document can be shared/distributed
 Define rules of collaboration at document
Defining document content:

 Define what information document's users already know

 Define what you want the users to be able to do after studying document
 Determine what kind of information document should contain
 Define best way to represent this information

Text, graphs, tables, numbers etc.

 Define sources of document's content

 Define how this information will be gathered
 Define what tools will be used by authors to fill document with information
 Define how often content of document will/can be updated
 Define the level of confidentiality of document's content
 Define how will security of document be regulated

Defining document termination and archiving:

 Define when document can be considered as expired

 Define who will sign-off the document
 Define how long document can stay valid
 Define how the document will be archived
 Define how long the document will stay in archive
 Define who will be able to access document in archive