Brexit and the impact on organisational policies and procedures

With the triggering of Article 50, the United Kingdom is likely to be out of the single market in two years time. It will be able to set its own regulations within the United Kingdom, but will almost certainly have to follow EU regulations when trading with EU27 countries.

This means organisations will have to manage two sets of compliance rules, and possibly two sets of policies and procedures, which will be similar in many areas.

One approach is to have two documents, cutting and pasting between the two. This can be time-consuming, and with this approach it is easy for mistakes to creep in.

Another way is to have one document with different sections marked up to identify which territory’s rules they relate to. This is known as conditional text. You create “conditional build tags” to include or exclude content from output, and then assign those tags to topics or parts of topics. For example, when you publish, you set the conditions to “United Kingdom” for the UK-only guide, and it will only contain the United Kingdom rules.

You can also create output that your users can easily filter based on parameters that you define using conditional text. For example, you can create a filter that allows your users to filter the output by UK or EU27 rules.

This approach means your writers can work from a single source – no more cutting and pasting!