policyIQ has been getting back to its roots lately, with a high demand for help managing policies and procedures.  And more often than not, Compliance and Audit Directors are the ones seeking help to pull together the governing documentation - going beyond just internal controls and focusing on the full picture Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC).  Policies are being recognized as the backbone of all of the varied compliance efforts - whether it is SOX, Anti-Bribery, Non-Discrimination, Anti-Harassment in the Workplace, or Privacy Laws.  Companies don't just want more easily accessible documentation - they want more effective documentation.  They want policies that have an impact on the behavior and culture of the entire organization.

How can your documentation "make an impact"?

Just last month, Art Weeast, Director of Process Management at Jones International, co-presented with our team on Process Intelligence in policyIQ.  He has utilized policyIQ to make internal documentation, particularly Procedures, more relevant, valuable and collaborative from the front line to the board room.  Mr. Weeast's process focused on making documentation complete, making it easy to create, and mapping front line procedures to the big picture processes.   At Jones International, both executives and staff understand the whole picture - and how each contributes to their overall success.

With effective process and procedure documentation, your employees can better understand how their daily work impacts the success of the company, but is everyone acting under the same core values that dictate their behavior or responses in any given situation?  Do they understand the corporate culture?

Policies set the tone for corporate culture

Corporate culture can be difficult to define.  Your mission statement might summarize it, but how does a new employee know the behaviors that will truly live up to it?  Does the company value entrepreneurship and innovation?  What is the risk appetite?  Do you have a formal reporting structure, or a more open, collaborative environment?  Are client relationships formal or do you create familial atmosphere with your client community?  How transparent are you with stakeholders?  Do you share everything, or keep information close to the vest? 

In a perfect world, the answer is that your policies will reflect and describe these behaviors and values, while the procedures provide the more specific steps and instructions for accomplishing tasks.

Govern your Governance

With all of this in mind, you can see how critical your policies, procedures and process documentation can be to the overall success of your organization.  It defines who you are and how you behave as a company.  Managing this critical information should be done with as much, if not more, care than any other compliance content - and yet it is more likely that policies and procedures are inconsistently documented on inaccessible and poorly administered shared drives or intranet sites.  Your policy management tool should offer you:

• Enforced consistency in documentation templates
• Automated audit trail and version history
• Security to determine who can read an item, who can edit it and who must approve it
• Collaborative workflow and approval processes
• Flexible organization and indexing
• Update alerts to keep employees informed of changes
• Sign-offs for critical content
• Oversight reporting to see who is reading or who made changes

Get what you need in policyIQ

This is the policyIQ blog, so we'd be remiss if we didn't suggest that you manage your policies and procedures in our product.  For the past 10 years, policyIQ has been working with organizations to manage their most critical documentation, and we've continued to create features and share best practices that make your policy management programs more powerful. 

We often hear organizations tell us that they prefer to keep their policies where they have always been - perhaps an intranet site, a shared directory or a Sharepoint site - because employees are already familiar with how to get them there.  Did you know that policyIQ pages can be linked into any of those locations without requiring a user to login or even realize that they are in policyIQ?  (And of course, read-only access is always free!) 

Contact us and let us help you to manage your policies more effectively and help you to build documentation that positively impacts your company, your employees and your bottom line!

Do you have several people in your chain of review and approval for certain documentation? We have talked to you before about how you can use the “Editors” property on your Pages, in addition to the Page Administrators, in order to accommodate several stages of development, review and approval.  Most organizations using policyIQ take advantage of the option to set up formal “Approvers” at the Page Template Level. We want to draw your attention to a little used feature that further enables you to manage and support multiple layers of review and approval. Notice the “Always Notify…” feature:

 
When you have several people who need to approve content, you can add their associated Group(s) to the “Content Approvers” field and select the “All Approvers” Approval Type. If you need a certain set of eyes to be the first to review the newly submitted content, add the owner of those eyes to the “Always Notify when Sent for Approval” field. This option exists for both Pages and Forms. The approver whom you’ve designated in this field will automatically receive an email each time a Page or Form from the Template is sent or submitted for approval. This helps to ensure a specified order of approval.

If you’d like to explore this further, check out the related guidance in policyIQ’s “Help” manual (click on the “Help” link in the top right corner of your policyIQ site).

What is a “PBC” Request?

As auditors comb through information gathered in their audit processes, they need to take care to separate and distinguish between those items prepared by the auditors and those items provided by the client; hence, the label “PBC” (a.k.a. Provided by Client). A recent request from a new policyIQ client for help to streamline this process of receiving and fulfilling auditor requests led us to notice that a number of other clients have moved ahead and automated this process in policyIQ on their own! (You never cease to impress us.)

Still managing Evidence Requests via email?

For those of you who are still exchanging critical documentation via email and then combing through your inbox and trying to keep lists and spreadsheets up to date to monitor who you’ve heard from, who still has materials outstanding, etc. read on to learn how you can ensure that this process is more efficient going forward.

So, essentially, you need a vehicle to 

• share the request for information with all of the appropriate business owners 
• collect and organize the submitted information and 
• pass the requested information back to the auditors.

Those users who are accustomed to tracking their risks, controls and account reconciliations using policyIQ’s “Pages” can likely imagine how Page Templates and associated workflow could be applied for this process. Likewise, those familiar with the use of policyIQ’s “Forms” for 302 certification, control self-assessment, and account reconciliations are also picturing how the Form functionality can be used to automate the PBC process.

How to Get Started

Set up a Form or Page Template (if you have a range of different approvers and want to simplify their process for identifying what content requires their approval, set up a different template for each Approver). Add fields to capture and track information that you may wish to report on such as control owner’s name, confirmation that necessary steps have been taken, or relative comments.

Pages or Forms: Is one better than the other?

Those submitting Forms can be Standard Users (lower license fee) and Form Administrators can use “Activities’ to monitor submissions in real time. Alternatively, Pages can be unpublished and amended making it simpler to track all materials associated with a particular request. For both Forms and Pages, you can grant auditors secure access to specified content (you can ensure that Viewers see only what you intend for them to view).

The big takeaway here is…

If it hadn’t occurred to you previously to bring greater efficiency and monitoring ability to this process before, you now recognize that you have this capability within easy reach and can run back and put the templates together. Let us know if you have any questions (support@policyIQ.com)—we’re happy to help!

Ask any long time policyIQ client and they'll tell you that it is unfathomable to imagine managing their content without that history of changes.  policyIQ has been around for 10 years and for 10 years, the Change History has been there providing an audit trail - making sure that every time a page is touched by a user, there is a record of what fields were changed, who made the change, and when the change was made.  The policyIQ Reporting tool allows you to build complex queries based on those changes -such as who made recent changes, what content was changed between a specified date range, what pages had a specific field updated in the last six months, and more.

An audit trail is a critical requirement of any content management application.  But in recent conversations with prospective clients and industry analysts, it has come up often that an audit trail is something that is difficult to implement with some content management solutions - particularly solutions built in-house or via Sharepoint - and we don't want you to take this fantastic feature for granted! 

Why do you need an audit trail?

There are lots of great reasons for having an audit trail, but it boils down to this: You want to know that the information in your system is accurate, updated appropriately and by the right people, and that nothing has been removed or deleted without appropriate approvals - and you want proof.

• Fraud Prevention and Detection - I don't like even having to mention this, but the potential for fraud is a fact of life. Knowing that there is an audit trail should prevent fraud attempts. If you can't prevent it, though, you'll be able to track down the source of the changes without much effort.
  
  
• Oversight and Peace of Mind - With a complete audit trail, you don't have to worry that changes are happening to your content without your knowledge - or that you won't be able to track down the source of those changes.

Cautionary tale: The policyIQ audit trail is no joke. 

If you collaborate on content in policyIQ, you are familiar with the options to send emails as you pass content along to another user, customizing the message that gets sent out.  But did you know that the custom text you include in those emails is captured in the audit trail?  You might be tempted to think of these "Notes" as pure email text, but those words will be captured in policyIQ forever - and visible to anyone who may have edit rights to the page in the future. 

Rule of thumb?  Don't put anything in the "Notes" field of policyIQ that you wouldn't be comfortable putting into an email that will be read by the entire company.

Resources Global Professionals recently completed the annual global survey of supply chain leaders and executives and received over 100 responses:  70% of the responses were from publicly traded companies, and 60% were from companies that have global / multi-national operations. 

The results revealed that cost containment and cost reduction continue to remain very high priorities for the coming year.  Two additional consistent responses:  First, is the desire to have technology play a key role in their transformational efforts to move away from tactical activity to a more strategic focus. Secondly, leaders are focusing efforts to ensure that sourcing decisions factor in a risk assessment analysis in addition to the traditional price and total cost of ownership model.

Art Weeast, Director of Process Management at Jones International University, shows business professionals how to “think beyond the task of documenting policies and procedures to the intelligence of the information that is in those documents.” Pairing his technology and data expertise with his Lean Six Sigma and Organizational Change Management experience, Weeast helps organizations to create value within their documentation, solve common business problems, bridge communication gaps and effectively transition to a culture of enterprise-wide collaboration.

We were honored to have Art Weeast join our team to present his discipline that rests (and “relies”, he says) on policyIQ: “Process Intelligence: Leverage policyIQ Documentation to Promote Enterprise Collaboration”. (Watch the recording.)

While we’re presenting the highlights of the instruction here, it is plain to see that this is a hot topic that can span days, weeks and so on. Mr. Weeast encouraged audience members to connect with him. Let us know if you're interested and we'll put you in touch!

________________________________________

What is Process Intelligence? 

Process Intelligence, as defined by Weeast, is the simple concept of taking information that is documented in your procedures and connecting the dots between the entities (department to department, management to employees, employees to employees); this is what fosters collaboration. He encourages his audience to keep “what’s in it for me” (from the end user's/employee’s perspective) in mind as you develop content. Consider, “What problems and questions can this documentation solve?”
 
To demonstrate the application of Process Intelligence practices, Weeast discussed three common problems:  

• Employees and Management struggle to see the value in the documentation (mainly creating and maintaining the procedures)
• Work tasks are not clearly connected to executive priorities
• Business Units/Departments/Functions do not regularly collaborate on cross-functional process issues, often leading to tension and decreased productivity.

Make Your Documentation Useful for Solving Common Problems

The problem faced by many (maybe most) organizations: Employees and Management do not value the documentation.
Consider how you can make your documentation useful. Follow this three step process:

1) Set a course to establish more comprehensive documentation

Rather than tracking just the steps of the procedure, frequency, who performs...think of all of the everyday business questions that come up related to the procedures. Add Roles and Responsibilities, Applications Used, Definitions, Procedure Input and Output--these fields will help you to address common problems. Read further to see how.

2) Make it easy for process owners and your front-line doers to capture the documentation.

You don't have to complete the fields in consecutive order--in fact, we recommend against that. Following a different order will actually be easier: 

1. Procedure Steps - Describe the process steps (10 or less) with an incomplete sentence. These become your "step" headlines. Then, for each step, fill in the details: Who? What? When? Where? Why?
2. Procedure Input -  Looking at your steps, ask yourself "What gets this procedure started?"
3. Procedure Output - How do you know when you're done?
4. Purpose - Now, it is easier to write a meaningful purpose.
5. Roles & Responsibilities - Next, which roles are involved and what responsibilities are they carrying out?
6. Applications Used - List the applications that are used.
7. Definitions - List the definitions of key terms. 

The result is a procedure that looks something like this:

3) Make use of the intelligence that is inherent in your documentation to solve business problems.

With updated, comprehensive procedures, you can address common problems...effectively and efficiently!

• IT: Which business units are still using "xx application" that we’re considering retiring?
• Managers: Where are the procedures that the new employee has to learn or follow? Are they current?
• Staff and Above: Where are all of the documents that contain the fax number that needs to be updated? Where is the source document for that PDF?
• Staff and Above: For this critical, cross-functional process, how many procedures describe this process and how many employees are performing this work?

Put your information to work for you!

Connect Executive Priorities to Everyday Tasks

The common problem: Work tasks are not clearly connected to executive priorities.

The front line doers, on a day to day basis, do more repeatable processes than executives do. At the executive level, it is unlikely that you will see procedures. This is one root cause for the disconnect. It’s no wonder that executives generally don’t "feel" the value of the documentation and therefore, the employees don’t "feel" the priority from the executives to create and maintain the documentation. So for most of us, documentation becomes an unwelcome task to do.

The Solution: Help your organization to establish the connection between top priorities of the business and the tasks that hardworking employees carry out day after day.

Subject Matter Expert, Art Weeast, developed a method for establishing this connection. He calls it an "Operational Map".

 The detailed steps to build your own Operational Map are available to policyIQ users from your policyIQ Help guide. In summary, you will:

1. Document Primary Functions and Sub-functions from the Business Owner’s Perspective
1. Assign a letter to each function, and a number to each sub-function.
2. Prepare a List of Procedures for each Process Owner’s Area
3. Create a visual (Detail Link Report) of Functions and Sub-functions
4. Map each Procedure to it's related Sub-Function by playing "Operational Bingo". (i.e. "This procedure goes to B4, that one goes to H6...")

The result is:

• Gaps immediately stand out: sub-functions with little or no procedures become apparent. Within a sub-function, key processes not mentioned in the list of procedures become apparent.• Gaps immediately stand out: sub-functions with little or no procedures become apparent. Within a sub-function, key processes not mentioned in the list of procedures become apparent.
• Executives come down to a level of detail that they rarely visit—they better understand what it takes to get things done! They begin to appreciate the value—and the NECESSITY—of the documentation in a more highly regulated and complex world.
• Process Owners (the do-ers) appreciate the collaboration with executives. They sense the tone from the top and the priority becomes clear. The do-ers begin to understand the bigger picture—the risks that the organization faces and the importance of what they’re being asked to do. And they are very curious about what that other department does!!
  The Problem we aim to address: Linking executive objectives and risk to operational performance.

Four Steps to Cross-Functional Collaboration  

Frustrations build in an organization when communication and collaboration breaks down or does not exist among certain parties. You can tell this is happening when you or others can easily blame someone for inadequate, inconsistent or untimely inputs into your process. Or others who put disruptive demands on you to produce an output with a nearly impossible delivery date and provide inadequate information needed to meet the demand. As soon as you sense the frustration or tension, you and others are beginning to personalize the process.

The art of establishing collaboration among cross-functional parties can be reduced to four main steps. These steps serve to "depersonalize" the process and issues by allowing the parties to focus on the process and the desired end result.

• Meeting: Bring functional representatives together for a collaborative process review; be sure to have a high level map of the process for everyone to focus on, and ideally this would be  mediated by a neutral party.
• Current state: Have them describe the standard process; first without the history, exceptions or problems. Then revisit the standard process, identifying where issues and exceptions happen. Do not permit anyone to describe the solution along the way until you have agreement on the process.
• Future state: Now that the current state is defined, what does it look like? Re-draw your map. How is it better?
• Transition state: We go from current to future state through the transition state. Outline steps to get from where we are today to where we need to be; often times this is a project.

Think about what's happening here. Typically, if anyone ever does dare to address the communication breakdown among parties, what do they typically do? They work to identify the issue(s) and to problem solve against those issues. The process outlined by Jones International University's Director of Process Management, Art Weeast--who is an expert in operational and change management--takes an opposite approach; helping parties to very quickly begin working together effectively; the difference between fixing problems and solving problems is very subtle. This approach has proven to be more sustainable over time. 

Join the Conversation! 

For more information on Process Intelligence or on how you can use policyIQ to capture your procedures, create an organizational map or to “solve common business problems”, contact Support@policyIQ.com. Art Weeast also communicated that he is happy to take your questions. Let us know if you'd like for us to put you in touch with him.

With President Obama's signing of the JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) Act in early April, the regulatory requirements for a company considering going public have been lessened - making now a great time for a growing company to consider an IPO.  Resources Global Professionals' own Colleen Cunningham, Global Managing Director of Finance & Accounting, discusses the Act in more detail in her most recent blog post. 

"...the new law also eases many of the restrictions on early-stage business investing that have been in place since the original Securities Acts in the 1930s. As such, the process of “going public” as well as “being public” will be much easier for those companies that meet the definition of an “emerging growth company” (those with annual gross income under $1 billion in the most recently completed fiscal year)."

Colleen and the team at Resources have also prepared a summary of the Act, available online in our latest Financial Alert.

If you are a private organization considering an IPO, reach out to us and we'll connect you to Resources Global experts in your city who can help you navigate the process.

On two separate occasions within the past month, I've been approached by long-time policyIQ clients asking about ways to make their implementation of policyIQ just a little more friendly for their read-only users.

Thank you for asking!  I know it makes me a geek, but I love to have the opportunity to (virtually) sit with a client and problem solve.  In both cases, the organizations are using policyIQ as the portal to provide all policies, procedures, forms and reference materials to their employees.  (In one case, the portal is also publically available, as this non-profit organization must make their policies accessible to potential donors.)  The result is a lot of information - and the need to optimize how a user searches and retrieves the relevant content!

In this blog post, I thought I would share with you the top three issues that I discussed with these clients - and a few of the solutions that we proposed to solve them. 

Issue: There are a small number of critical pages that our employees are always looking for - and they find having to search or navigate every time they need to access the page to be time consuming.

Users who are getting into policyIQ with read-only access do not have the advantage of being able to use "Favorite Pages" - so organizations need to be more creative in order to make the most common items easy to get to.  There are a number of ways to go about solving for this:

Solution 1: Link directly to a policyIQ page from your internal portal.  It surprises me to find that a lot of our policyIQ clients still don't know that you can link directly to a policyIQ page - including the pass-thru key that allows a read-only user to access the content without having to log into policyIQ.  Using these direct pass-thru links are invaluable if you want to give employees quick access to the most critical content, such as a Code of Conduct Policy.

Solution 2: Create a Folder at the top level of your hierarchy for "Commonly Accessed Pages".  Your read-only users don't have access to Favorites, but that doesn't mean you can't create a "Favorites" Folder for them.  If you know that there are ten pages every user wants to access quickly, create a Folder at the very top of your hierarchy and make those items available.

Solution 3: Use the Read-Only Dashboard to link directly to the most commonly accessed items!  You can link directly to pages - so why not add a few direct hyperlinks to the most commonly accessed items right on the read-only Dashboard?  No searching, no navigation, no problem!

________________________________________________________________________

Issue: We have policies where the official language might refer to "Travel Reimbursement" - but the search terms are more often something along the lines of "Travel Expenses".  How can we make sure this still appears near the top of the search results?

It's not uncommon for the "official language" used in a policy to be a little bit different than what your average user might be searching for.  The key is making sure that you still have those more common terms in a searchable field.

Solution: Create a Rich Text (HTML) field on your Template for "Common Search Terms".  You have the option of making this field invisible to your end users by de-selecting the "View in Home" option when creating the field.  Whether it is visible or not, use this field to add common search terms that will help your users to find the page - even if the words wouldn't specifically appear within the other text of the page.  (Tip - Make this field "Editable While Published" so that you can easily make updates even while the page stays published!)

________________________________________________________________________

Issue: When someone searches, they get a lot of results returned that may not really be relevant to their department.  How can we narrow down their search results?

Read-only access is a great way to grant all employees access to organizational content - but if your users are searching for information, they may finding a lot of results that are just not very relevant.

Solution 1: Use the Read Only Dashboard to illustrate to the user how they can narrow down their search results by choosing only Folders in which the relevant information might reside.  When searching in policyIQ, any user can choose to narrow down the search results by the Folder or the Template from which the content is created.  If you are looking for an accounting-related policy, for example, you can immediately narrow down your results to just those in the Accounting Folders.  IT content isn't likely to be very useful.  Add this tip to the Read-Only Dashboard, so that your users know how to go this extra level in the search results.

Solution 2: Create multiple read-only pass thru links to your policyIQ application - and limit the viewers on pages.  For example, if I enter policyIQ as an "Accounting Staff Person", the results of my search will already be limited to only those items that are relevant to someone on the accounting staff.  In order to do this, you'll need to have multiple pass-thru links into policyIQ - and if you have an internal website where these links are located, you want to be clear about which link someone should click on.  (Tip - this is useful if you have just a few categories of users, but more than 3 or 4 and just figuring out which pass thru link to click on becomes a burden!)

Do you need more information on how to implement any of the recommendations above?  Do you have a different issue that you'd like some help to resolve?  Reach out and we'll be happy to help you make the policyIQ experience as smooth as possible for your users.

On April 19th, Art Weeast, Director of Process Management at Jones International University, asks us to think beyond the task of documenting policies and procedures to the intelligence of the information that is in those documents. In other words, how do you get the business to rely on these documents and thereby want to keep them current and relevant? How do you make this content the “Wikipedia” of your organization?

Join us on April 19th at noon PT, 3ET (click here to register). We will present examples and provide guidance that will allow you to make improvements to your documentation—and therefore your business—immediately following the session.

Art will show us how he leverages policyIQ to pull all of the information together to solve common business problems. Do you have functions or processes that seem to always have tension between them? Art will also demonstrate how he has taught organizations to use their documentation and process intelligence to promote enterprise collaboration.

Participants will be eligible to earn 1 CPE credit for attending this live session.

I recently attended the AIIM Conference. John Mancini and his team did a terrific job of pulling together a great line-up and creating ample learning and networking opportunities for attendees. I was impressed by the diversity of industries, disciplines, and interests that were represented. I guess this should come as no surprise as Information Management has to be a top priority for all successful businesses in this tech-disruptive time that we find ourselves in.

Approximately 700 information professionals attended and I think I counted more than 60 presenters?! WOW. I consistently heard lessons presented on the themes of data/analytics, cloud, social, and mobile technologies. This should also come as no surprise as Gartner and the New Media Consortium/Educause have both identified these as the top technologies and emerging trends to watch for their impending influence on business and education. A fifth theme that I heard might be the result of the Stephenie-filter that I was wearing: solve problems. This might seem rediculously obvious, but I felt the need to pull it out as its own theme for lessons that I didn't want to fade into the background.

When I got back to the office, I had to spend some time digging out of the sea of emails and work that was waiting for me. Then I met with my boss (you probably know Chris Burd) to debrief. While the policyIQ Team has kept very busy this year addressing a number of relevant initiatives, the conference discussions and themes helped me to better see and organize some “to dos” for the policyIQ Team. This feels a bit like writing a book report, but my aim is to think about our business and to develop an actionable “how to” that our team can use to shape and guide our priorities in keeping with the top tech trends that are probably being discussed at your office, too.

In the spirit of being more transparent (a commitment that we’ve made to our customers based on your feedback to our client survey), I am sharing our “to do list” with you here:

policyIQ To Do List

Data/Analytics:
With emerging technologies comes an explosion of data. We need to be thinking about how to use, and make useful, the information at hand. Consideration must be given to

• search (easy, fast, powerful, smart),
• tagging (by users based on relevance),
• reporting (simple and powerful, readily available),
• and visual representations of data.

We are in the midst of a Social Disruption!
This movement isn't just about socializing and it's not just about marketing...think of it as engaging them. Engagement is key—just ask the folks at Gallup. Several speakers at the AIIM Conference referenced Gallup engagement studies.

Companies and organizations of all shapes and sizes need to be thinking about how to engage their employees, members, customers, partners and vendors. (I’m focusing on the customer angle for this post.)

How can we leverage the power of collaboration?

• Invite Feedback and instill Transparency in the Process (like providing visibility into Feature Requests and our development plans).
• Ask questions and do more listening than talking--we need to check in with our customers more frequently throughout the development process.
• Show our customers ways that they can collaborate with each other, and then get out of their way! For example, we could share some ideas on how to use policyIQ to host a Wiki for each process area.
• Borrowing recognizable game mechanics like ratings, points, levels and recognition or reward, we can engage our customers in identifying and delivering the most useful data (there's that word again) such as new policyIQ features, their policyIQ content, our user manual (Help) pages, our training materials, and so on.

Mobile, Time/Place Independent
There’s no question that tablets are a disruptive technology. I heard time and again that we need to think about what our customers do ‘at the task level’ and then consider what we can do in our ‘customer’s pocket’ (resist the visual—this is serious stuff)!

This is a tricky one for me to address…I know what it means, and we have some catching up to do. We’re soon to be cross-browser compatible, but that’s not enough!

What things could we help to automate that are “in the flow” of what our customers do?

• access checklists,
• sign-offs, 
• approvals, 
• questionnaires from any device.

Are there other things you can think of?

Cloud Technology
policyIQ was launched “in the cloud” nearly a decade ago. The obvious benefit is easy access from virtually anywhere…AND it’s likely more secure than most “in-house” applications (did you know that?).

Cloud products and services are big time and money savers. Customers don’t have to invest so much in technology infrastructure, specialized skillsets for design and development, nor the manpower to maintain that infrastructure and the applications hosted on it.

What more can we do to help customers leverage the power of the cloud?

Let's talk some more about integration with other common applications.

Solve Problems
As we mature in our “agility” we need to refine and speed up our cycles of customer feedback and implementation. We won’t get it right every time. As a matter of fact, we need to get more comfortable with failure. In the spirit of being Agile, we need to “fail fast”, learn and start a new cycle—this is how we will continuously improve and better meet customer needs.

UX! User Experience is something we have talked about since policyIQ was born, but we need to hone our discipline. We need to make the product more

• Intuitive
• Fast
• Powerful
• Scalable
• And Accessible
• While still Secure

Solving problems and focusing on user experience really spans across all of the tech trends listed here and those to come. We need to continually talk to our customers and understand their circumstances.

• What can we help them to do?
• How can we make them more efficient?
• How can we help them to solve business problems?
• How can we help them to communicate with their stakeholders?
• How can we help them to make use of the intelligence of their content?   

Isn’t this an exciting time that we’re in? The AIIM Conference was a terrific experience. I appreciate the opportunity to meet some great thinkers and to hear from some terrific speakers (if you ever have an opportunity to hear David Pogue speak, it's more than worthwhile). I left the conference both exhausted and energized! I hope the enthusiasm and ispiration are contagious. 

To our customers:
The policyIQ team is excited to be a part of this tech-revolution and we’re taking steps to ensure that we’ll continue to bring value to our customers for many years to come. Do you have some ideas that I didn’t mention? We welcome your feedback and additions. Actually, inspired by this ongoing discussion, we’re continuing to brainstorm ways that we can collect your feedback and better engage our customers. Let us know what your wish list looks like! We’re anxious to hear them! Please use the Comment field below or send an email to Support@policyIQ.com.

Credit:

Special thanks to the presenters and big thinkers who provided great inspiration at the AIIM Conference! Here is a list of those that I followed and that I credit for the inspiration and energy that came back home and to work with me:

When we work with a brand new policyIQ client, we talk a lot about the best way to train team members on the new application.  It's a part of the implementation project for any new process or software application.

But how often do you think about how you are going to train new employees on policyIQ if they join the team next month?  Or next year?  For some of you, you have created a comprehensive training program, policyIQ Reference Guide and tip sheets to help new users.  Congratulations!  You are ahead of the curve. 

For most of you, however, you haven't had an opportunity to pull together those materials - and we want to help!  There are a number of types of resources already available to you from the policyIQ team - and summarized in a few blog posts from the past couple of years.  Consider the following:

1. Focus on written guidance that you can customize: Learn more about the resources available to you directly within the policyIQ online Help guide.

2. Give users access to the right recorded training sessions: Dig into the recorded training materials - and personal assistance - available to users at every level.

Want to discuss the best plan for your users?  Need some personalized assistance or custom training?  Contact us and we'll be happy to speak with you about the best solution for your on-going user training needs!

Periodically, our policyIQ support team will ask us to write a blog post on a topic that is coming up frequently from our clients.  Recently, we were asked to address the concept of "Expiration Dates".

We have a lot of content that is "expired" according to policyIQ.  Can I update those dates so that I don't get any more annoying reminders?  Is there an easy way to do that?

The answer to both of those questions is yes, but before I tell you how to do it, I'm going to ask you to think about what Expiration Dates are all about and put a plan around how your organization should (or perhaps should not) be using them.  It will save you time - and make your content more effective.

What is an Expiration Date?  What is its purpose?

policyIQ was built on some basic principles of Effective Policy Management.  One of those principles is that your content needs to stay fresh - and you need to create a process for keeping content owners accountable for updates.  This is where the concept of Expiration Dates in policyIQ originated.

Expiration Dates are designed to be reminders to content owners (or "administrators" in policyIQ vernacular) that the specific page of content hasn't been edited or updated within a certain period of time.   This concept of keeping content fresh is critical for things like policies and procedures.   Your audience needs to know that what they are reading is current.

Do I have to use Expiration Dates?  My content doesn't really "expire".

In 10 years, the usage of policyIQ has shifted from primarily the management of policies and procedures, to a full content management and process automation application across many areas of the business.  And in many cases, the "content" that is managed by policyIQ doesn't expire - but rather it is point in time data that should be retained in its original state.

For this reason, we've made Expiration Dates optional, based on the Template from which the content is created.  If your Audit Test Results don't ever expire - and why should they? - you can remove this requirement from your Template.

How?  If you are the Template Administrator, go to Setup --> Templates and drill into your Template Properties.  On the Expiration Date tab, set the "Required Expiration Date" to No.  Set the "Default Expiration" to "0" in order to remove any defaults that might appear when a page is published.

I don't like the term "Expiration Date".  Can I change it?  Or hide it on the page?

Unfortunately, the answer to this one is "no" at the present time - but we have heard this from several of you, and we're considering the best way to address it!  Because the field does serve a great purpose for many organizations, we want to make sure that we continue to meet the needs that the feature serves, while allowing you to have more flexibility around how it appears.

Let us know how YOU feel about expiration dates.  Do you use them on all content?  Just certain types of pages?  Do you have a different term that you'd prefer to see instead of "Expiration Date"?

And if we can help you to make the best use of Expiration Dates, please contact us and we'll be happy to assist!

In our last blog post, we talked a little bit about how we started to use the Scrum methodology to manage all of the projects that go into supporting policyIQ.  We found ourselves in need of a tool, and set about using policyIQ to manage our new Scrum process.

Scrum in policyIQ for policyIQ

We can't tell you what the best policyIQ configuration will be for managing the Scrum methodology for your business.  Every team is going to be different.  But we're happy to tell you a little more about what we're doing.

I mentioned in the last blog post that we started with user stories and then we went back to goals.  Essentially, we currently have two primary Templates that are a part of our Scrum process.

• Goals
• User Stories

On our Goal templates, we capture the following:

• Description of Goal
• Area of the business (sales, marketing, product, support, etc)
• Priority

Each Goal is linked to User Stories that will support the goal.  The fields here are much more detailed, and include:

• User Story Statement
• Business Value (or "Impact")
• Effort
• Status
• Blocked By
• Currently Worked On By

We meet bi-weekly to review our last sprint - were there items that didn't get finished?  Why? - and to plan for our next sprint.  As we plan, we move User Stories from the Backlog into individual sprint folders.  (If something doesn't get finished in a single sprint, we keep it in both the older and the newer sprint folders.  It's a lesson learned for us that we planned imperfectly - either we didn't break our user story down into enough detail or there was a block that we couldn't overcome in the given sprint.)

And of course, we use the policyIQ reports to plan, update our sprint items and to evaluate our progress.  For the purposes of our scrum process, I personally almost never find myself in Create And Edit - but rather stick to the reports to take care of all of my updates and planning.

Flexibility?  Yeah, we're gonna need that.

We find ourselves telling clients frequently that one of the benefits that policyIQ brings to the table is the flexibility to change the configuration or the process if you find that something isn't quite working for you.  In our last blog post you read about how we ended up going back and changing the way we set priorities a bit, by going back to high level goals to prioritize.  That doesn't really tell the whole story - as the truth is that we've really gone back and revisited the process with almost every sprint to make small adjustments.  New fields, new values, new Folders and new Templates.  Lucky for us, policyIQ has allowed us to do that without having to make any significant changes to the original documentation.

Are you using Agile or Scrum in your daily work?  We'd love to chat and learn what best practices you've found - and share some of our lessons learned.  Of course, if you are interested in using policyIQ to  manage your projects, let us know and we'd be happy to show you more of what we've done!

If your role in any way touches the world of technology, it's likely that you've heard of "Agile Methodology" as a way to manage software development.  The concept is pretty simple (and I'm going to simplify it even further): build, test, and get feedback in short iterations.

A specific method of implementing Agile Development is Scrum, a method by which a team works together in short "sprints" to complete specific goals.  (The folks at scrum.org do a fabulous job of summarizing the method - and it has very little to do with rugby.)  Our product development team has been using Scrum to develop policyIQ for awhile now.  The short (typically 2 week) sprints allow the team to complete the development on a feature, test it and get feedback - sometimes directly from customers and sometimes from our policyIQ account management team. 

The enthusiasm around Scrum was infectious - and the whole team caught the bug

As the development team started to really smooth out their Scrum process, it was clear that the methodology kept things on track.  And the enthusiasm for it was infectious.  While "Agile" and "Scrum" are typically words associated with the actual software development, we started to ask, "Why can't these same principles be applied to everything else that the policyIQ team is working on?"  So we set about applying Scrum to the entire team - and we needed the help of our internal policyIQ application to do it. 

I should point out that I am NOT a trained Scrum professional.  Our Senior Manager of Technology is trained; with his guidance, we've taken some liberties with the "official" methodology to apply it to our work.

How do you get started?  You just start.

One of the lessons that our trained "scrum master" (ie our Senior Director of Technology) taught us was that you can't get too caught up in starting off perfectly.  You just have to get started.  So we did.

We started by taking all of the project plans and "boy wouldn't it be nice" lists, and translated those into User Stories - descriptions of the project or task that focus on what the impact of those projects might be.  For example, we wanted to issue a Client Survey.  The user story read:  "The policyIQ team wants to craft a Client Survey, so that we can better understand the needs and desires of our current client base as it relates to product features, support and training."

The Scrum method suggests that you determine the length of time for each "Sprint" - no longer than 30 days - and then break your projects down into pieces, so that you can complete those pieces within the sprint.  So, the Client Survey User Story had to be revised to become multiple user stories in order to be able to accomplish parts of it within a sprint, starting with the draft of questions, all the way through follow-ups and long-term goal planning.  Scrum also requires that you prioritize each item so that you can pick out those items that will have the most value (weighted for how much effort it requires).

We incorporated 5 - 10 minute daily morning meetings into our routine, so that we could keep everyone up to date on what was accomplished, what was on the agenda for the day, and what issues were causing delays or "blocks".

Revisiting, revising, rethinking

We had gotten started, but the first few sprints just didn't go so smoothly.  Other things kept popping up and we weren't getting those sprint items completed - but those "things that kept popping up" were really important tasks that couldn't be delayed.  We realized that we really had to rethink and better prioritize what we actually put into our sprints and we had to leave room in our sprint schedules to address last minute priorities.  So we took a step back and documented our high level goals, and prioritized THOSE, as well.  Then we referenced the high level Goal in each User Story, so that we could better focus on the goals that were our top priority.

But how are we going to track our progress?

All of these user stories and goals have to be managed - and it won't surprise you to learn that we chose policyIQ to manage the information.  In our follow-up blog post later this week (Using policyIQ to manage Scrum), we'll show you how we implemented our Scrum process using policyIQ!

Some of you may also remember that our friends at Equinox co-presented with us last year to show our policyIQ clients how they manage their software development and IT projects using policyIQ and Agile.  Check out this recording to learn more about their process!

Why can’t I see any Pages in this Folder?
 

I noticed a couple of questions coming into the policyIQ Support desk this last month related to securing content in policyIQ and thought that others might have similar questions.

I’ll give you the punch-line first: Rely on Page Security to secure content and think of Folder Security as Folder “Visibility”. Let’s talk more about what I mean by this…

Use Page Security to Set Read/Write Access to Pages

 
Notice the “Security” tab within your Pages. It is here that Page Administrators can adjust who has read (Viewers) versus write (Editors and Administrators) access to this Page. These appointments are completely independent of where the Page resides. It is of critical importance that your Page Security be adjusted to ensure proper access to (or restriction from) the content.

Use Folder “Security” to establish who can see the Folder – More like Folder Visibility

While it is true that you can put Pages into Folders and make the various Folders visible to different audiences, this does not secure your Pages or ensure that Pages may not be otherwise located (via Search, for example).

A Folder can be viewable by a person who has not been given read or write access to the Pages that are indexed into that Folder (if they are within a Group that is added to the “Viewers” field in the Folder properties—as illustrated above). The Folder will appear empty in this scenario. Conversely, a person might not be able to see a Folder in the left navigation, but if they run a Search for Pages and the Page Security has not been properly adjusted, they might still see those Pages in the Search results.

By making a Folder “Visible” and designating different Groups in the “Viewers” field, you are really making the view of Folders in Home simpler or more complex to your policyIQ users (see examples in image below)—this does not impact the security or right to actually see content.
 

Did I clear anything up for anyone? Re-reading this, I wonder if it sounds like a Dr. Seuss story to someone who is not already familiar with Folder and Page behavior. Let us know! We’d be happy to walk through your site and content with you and to help ensure that you are sharing (and hiding) content as you intended.