Is there a document management system or process that keeps track of child/forked documents?

Question

I may need to cross-post, but I'd see if anyone has experience with this project management issue.

We have a core document, say, a series of standards, that, based on that, we create solution guides, promotional materials, or other supporting documents. The idea is that every time you change that core document, you have a way to trigger or flag all the downstream documents for checking to see if they have to be updated or are fine as-is. It's not always a direct citation of a particular standard, but something as general as "because we have standard 1.3a, we wrote this explanatory document". If 1.3a changes, that explanatory document may need to change, or be removed, even.

I've been reading about document management systems, and they seem to have versioning, but I don't see this particular kind of feature out there. Are there specific terms I should be looking for in evaluating the product, or does someone out there have a workflow that they use to make this process relatively painless?

Answer 1

Tracing Requirements

You may be talking about a traceability matrix or requirements traceability. There are certainly commercial products in that space (e.g. DOORS) that may be suitable, but in many cases a versioned spreadsheet or ASCII table under revision control may be enough.