What does a complete document look like?

PolicySight has been writing policies and governance documents since 2018. Operating models, business cases, risk registers, policies. I've been writing documents for a living for a lot longer than that, since 1996, starting with trade documentation in banking.

Whatever the document, the same question sits underneath it.

What should this cover?

Not everyone has a template

Some organisations have a house template for everything. The bigger, more mature ones usually do. Plenty don't, especially smaller ones, and someone ends up with a blank page and a deadline.

The document I was asked for most was a target operating model, and it's a good example. It covers how an organisation will work in future: its people, processes, technology, governance, who decides what, and how you get there from where you are today. That's a lot of ground to hold in your head.

On a blank page, it's hard to picture what a complete document looks like. You can search for examples and piece one together, and plenty of people do. But it takes time, every example is shaped for someone else's organisation, and you're still left wondering what you've missed.

Having a template isn't the same as having a complete one

Even where a template exists, it isn't necessarily complete. Large institutions have gaps in their documents too. A gap is easy to miss when you're filling in sections someone else chose.

So we built complete ones

Every one of our templates has every section it could reasonably need. The Target Operating Model has sixteen, from the executive summary through governance, decision rights, technology and data, to the gap analysis and the roadmap.

That's on purpose. It's much easier to delete a section that doesn't fit than to realise, three months in, that you never wrote the one that did. Keep what's right for your organisation, delete the rest, and make it yours.

Every section opens with a short guidance box: what the section is for, and what a good answer looks like. The tables carry worked examples, so you can see the shape of a finished document before you've written a word.

There are three to start with:

• Target Operating Model, for how an organisation will work in future
• Business Case, for when you need to make the argument for a change and ask for a decision
• Risk Register, for when you need to show what could go wrong, who owns it and what's being done about it

Researched, not just written

Where a template touches the law, it's researched and written to the law of England and Wales as at its review date.

The Target Operating Model also comes with a short region guide for Europe and the United States, and the others will follow. It isn't legal advice and doesn't pretend to be. It lists what to check in each place and who regulates it, and a second researcher checked every line against official sources before it went live.

We review every template every six months, and each one's page on the site shows when it was last reviewed and when the next review is due.

"Can't AI just write one?"

Yes, it can. The best AI models will write you a decent first draft of any of these in a couple of minutes now, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. We build our software with AI, so I'd be the last person to argue.

But not everyone can use those tools at work. Plenty of organisations limit which AI tools their people can use, often for good reasons.

And a chat answer isn't a finished document. You still have to get it into Word, lay it out, check what it says against the law and hope it's current.

These are done for you. The research is done, checked and dated, and it's reviewed every six months. They open in Word with nothing underlined, the headings number themselves and the contents page is already filled in. The fonts follow the document's theme, so you can switch to your house font from the Design tab in a couple of clicks.

Free, with no catch

There's no email wall. You don't sign up for anything and nobody will chase you. Click download and it's yours.

There's no logo in them either. The only trace of us is one small line on the last page. They're your documents, not our advert.

The one thing I'd ask is that you treat them as a starting point. They're templates, not policy, and they aren't legal advice. Have your own legal, regulatory and compliance advisers check anything before you rely on it.

Why give them away?

Writing documents like these is the work PolicySight was built on. Today we publish software that runs inside Microsoft 365, but documents are where we started, and it felt right to put that experience somewhere useful.

And let's be honest, most people don't like writing documents. These give you a massive head start.

If you've ever been handed a blank page and a deadline, these are the templates I wish I'd had.

There are three today, with more on the way. You'll find them all at policysight.com/templates.

And if your documents have committees and working groups in them, that's what Governance Hub is for.