Identify the authoritative source
Ask each business area to name the document or system that owns its current instructions. Record the owner, intended audience and subject covered. A filename containing final is not a reliable ownership policy. In a fictional operations team, a signed-off equipment procedure might be authoritative while a presentation summarising it is supporting material. Decide which should drive answers when the two differ. Do not make the assistant infer authority from whichever document happens to appear first or contains the most recent-looking date.
Distinguish drafts, current and retired material
Give documents a clear status and define which statuses are eligible for ordinary answers. Preserve historical material where the business needs it, but keep it distinguishable from current instructions. A draft may contain a proposed change that has never been approved. A retired document may remain useful for a question about an earlier period. Explain how those cases should be handled instead of deleting all history or treating every stored file as equally applicable. Keep the status in the source process that staff actually maintain.
Make ownership part of the update
Define who approves a change and who publishes it to the collection used by the assistant. Record the effective date where relevant and a short explanation of what changed. If different teams own conflicting instructions, resolve that through the business owners. The assistant should not invent a rule for which department wins. Keep updates specific enough that a reviewer can identify the questions affected. A change to an approval limit, for example, should trigger different checks from a formatting correction that leaves the process unchanged.
Check the complete update path
Confirm that the approved source reaches the collection the assistant searches, and that the retired version is handled according to the policy. Do not infer completion from a successful file upload alone. Ask the implementation team to show which copy is available to the running assistant and when it was refreshed. Where updates are scheduled, distinguish publication from availability in answers. Record failures and assign an owner to resolve them. Staff need to know if a new procedure exists but the assistant still answers from the previous one.
Test a changed rule and an unchanged rule
After an update, ask a question whose answer should change and another whose answer should remain the same. Inspect the response and its source reference. Include a historical question if older documents remain searchable. Check for answers that combine incompatible versions. Use approved test cases rather than relying on whether the new filename appears somewhere in a dashboard. If the update removes a rule, verify that the assistant no longer presents it as current. Absence can be as important to test as newly added text.
Keep the collection maintainable
Review documents without owners, conflicting copies and sources no longer used by the business. Archive or exclude them through the agreed process rather than making quiet changes to shared files. Keep a current-source register small enough for owners to review and link it to the actual documents. Repeat checks after changing storage locations or access permissions. Report what was verified and what still awaits publication or review. Version control is working when staff can identify the current source and demonstrate that the assistant uses it for the relevant questions.