Which practice ensures that changes to SOPs are properly recorded and approved before implementation?

• A. Role-based access
• B. User authentication
• C. Approval workflows for changes
• D. Maintained audit trails

Answer: (C)

Approval workflows for changes provide a formal path for proposing, reviewing, and approving updates to SOPs before they are implemented. They ensure every proposed modification is captured, routed to the appropriate approvers, and time-stamped with who approved it and when. This creates a clear, auditable record tied to a specific version of the SOP, and it enforces that changes cannot go live without explicit authorization. Without such a workflow, role-based access and identity verification control who can act, and audit trails show what happened, but neither alone guarantees that an update was properly reviewed or approved before being applied. Maintained audit trails are valuable for after-the-fact visibility, but the approval workflow is the mechanism that enforces the pre-implementation approval step.