7 Tips for More Efficient Policy and Procedure Management

1. Define Your Objectives and Goals

• What are your problems and risks?
• How are your P&P’s managed today — getting better, getting worse, or staying the same?
• If you don’t know the problem, can you fix it?
• Are you measuring the correct output?

2. Start Simple, and Keep it Simple

• Start with the simplest documents and objectives and expand as familiarity grows
• Demand little or no impact on IT and minimize interference with existing operations
• Understand your options and alternatives
• Provide one solution to deliver
• P&P management
• Employee communication
• Measurement & monitoring
• Enforcement capabilities

3. Focus on Your Employees and Each Employee

• Make it easy and intuitive so employees start using it and see results immediately
• Building confidence and easing concerns results in fast adoption and fast tract to compliance
• Provide the right information to the right people at the right time, every time

4. Establish Metrics and Measure

• Determine what is important to the organization
• Produce a global view of compliance for a complete picture of your employee knowledge base and levels of compliance
• Require and extensive audit capability with thorough documentation and enforcement to reduce threat of litigation and other consequences
• Continuously review and refine your process

5. Automate When You Can

• Workflow for consistent and repeatable and measurable process
• Email & text message alerts and reminders for consistent enforcement
• Testing for better knowledge development, retention, and quality
• Integration to minimize errors, streamline process, and strengthen adoption

6. Make it Flexible and Scalable

• Your organization grows, reorganizes, changes processes and has exceptions
• New policies and procedures, and revisions of existing P&P’s, are never ending
• The faster and more efficiently these issues are addressed the better it is for the employee and the organization
• Leads to adoption, use, and continuing relevance

7. Get Started Today

• If not, why not? What are the costs vs. the benefits?
• Challenges and Risk will only increase
• You learn more as you progress
• “A good plan executed today is better than the perfect plan tomorrow” — General George S. Patton