In my role at J&J I have worked heavily with many different types of documents. The easiest way to improve document control is to make sure that everyone understands what the documents are and why they are important. When I first started at my position I was eager to learn a lot about the function of the company, so I spent a lot of time talking to people in all of our departments and was able to understand the documents that I would be working on and why they were important. But the people I work with often include unnecessary information or do not include the right information because the do not understand what the end goal of the document is. So in order to improve document control understanding of the documents must be increased.

How to go about this is a different problem. No one wants to go through more training and those who check the documentation often do not want to take the time to teach people or make documents explaining what the different documents are for. So it may fall on the heads of an intern or co-op to create a master document that explains the function of all the other documents and why they are needed.

How would you increase document understanding?