When the Organisation Changes

An organisation can change very quickly. Its documents usually take longer to catch up.

A merger, restructure, new name or change in services can affect far more than the obvious pages on a website. The old organisation may still be sitting in application forms, policies, standard letters, staff documents, reports, downloadable PDFs and information written several years earlier.

Finding all of it can become an editorial job in its own right.

A New Name Is Rarely Just a New Name

Changing an organisation's name sounds straightforward until somebody starts looking for everywhere the old one appears. Headers and logos may be obvious, but the name can also be buried in introductions, copyright notices, email templates, forms, references, file names and documents stored online.

There may also be shortened versions, abbreviations and possessive forms to find. If the organisation has changed its legal status as well as its name, some references may require more than a simple replacement.

A global search-and-replace can help, but it cannot decide whether every reference should actually be changed.

Restructures Leave Clues Everywhere

Departments disappear, teams combine and responsibilities move. Six months later, a form still tells people to contact the department that no longer exists.

Job titles are particularly good at surviving restructures. Instructions may direct a reader to a particular officer, manager or committee even though responsibility has moved elsewhere. Other documents may describe an approval process that no longer reflects how decisions are made.

An editor reviewing material after a restructure can look for those references systematically rather than waiting for someone to discover them when they try to follow the instructions.

Services Change Too

Organisations do not always stop doing something cleanly on a particular date. A service may be reduced, expanded, renamed, transferred elsewhere or combined with another one.

That can leave contradictory descriptions across different documents. One page describes what is offered now, another describes what was offered two years ago and an old downloadable leaflet continues to appear in search results.

This is where checking individual documents is not enough. The organisation needs to know which information is current and then make sure its published material agrees with it.

A Merger Creates Two Histories

Mergers bring a particular problem because both organisations arrive with their own terminology, documents and ways of describing what they do.

Simply choosing one set of words can lose distinctions that still matter. Keeping both can leave the new organisation sounding as though its two halves have never quite met.

An editor can identify where names, terminology, descriptions and procedures conflict, but decisions about what the new organisation now calls something or how it describes its role have to be made by the organisation itself. Once those decisions have been made, they can be applied consistently.

Decide What Is Still Current

Not every old document needs updating. Some reports, archived publications and historical material belong to the organisation as it existed at the time and changing them could make the record less accurate rather than more.

The useful question is whether the document is historical or still in use.

Material that people still rely on needs to describe the organisation as it operates now. Material kept as a record may need to remain exactly as it was, perhaps with a note explaining that names or circumstances have since changed.

An organisational change therefore creates two editorial jobs: finding what needs changing and recognising what should be left alone.