October 2010 - Posts

• Top 7 Quick Tips to make Exporting Reports Less "Scary"!

  We're wrapping up a month of blog posts on policyIQ reports by saving the "scariest" topic for last: exporting reports from policyIQ to Microsoft Excel.   We receive a number of emails from users asking for help formatting or adjusting their exported reports - so here are seven of our top tips!    1. Remove the first row of merged cells When exported into Excel, row 1 will always show you the Name of the Report.  This is great information, but the merged cells in that first row will make it difficult to sort and filter your content.  Instead, save your report using this name - and then remove that first row to give yourself the flexibility to sort, filter and rearrange your data more easily! 2. Automatically Resize Rows The cells in your exported report results will be automatically formatted to "wrap text" - but they will be sized to only display one row. To show the full descriptions (such as a full "Project Task Description"), highlight the entire worksheet and then place your mouse on the line between any two row numbers. Double-click your left mouse button, and the rows will be automatically resized to show all of the text in each cell. You might find that this makes your cells far too long if your text in any column is extensive.  In that case, you may prefer to repeat the highlight of your entire sheet, and instead resize a single row to what might be a typical size.  That will resize all of your rows to an identical height. 3. Remove dark row separators and replace with standard Excel gridlines I don't know about you, but I'm not a big fan of heavy outlines around the cells or rows in my Excel spreadsheets. I like to keep things simple and rely instead on the standard gridlines that Excel so conveniently provides. If you are like me, you can easily remove the borders with a few simple steps: A. Highlight the entire worksheet. B. Go to your toolbar and find the icons for your borders. Select the option for "No borders". C. If you want to add in the gridlines, you can go to View in your toolbar (or in your ribbon, for those Office 2007 users), and choose to view the gridlines. D. You also need to remove the white "fill" in the background before those gridlines will appear. Highlight the sheet, and go to the Fill icon and choose "No Fill". 4. Remove any undesirable HTML ‘tags' Some of you may have found that when you export content into Excel, some characters in your text are appearing as the coded HTML tags rather than the characters themselves. Some examples might be dashes, which appear as ‐ rather than simply "-", or quotes which appear as ". The explanation of why this happens could be a blog post in itself, but the bottom line is that it displays properly in the policyIQ pages, but MS Excel doesn't interpret those correctly as the characters you intended. There's an easy fix, though! Highlight your entire worksheet and do a Find / Replace. (Just hit Cntrl F on your keyboard.) Enter ‐ as the text to find, and - as the text with which to replace it. Click Replace All and you're done! 5. Create hyperlinks in the "Item URL" column You have the option of exporting the "Item URL" as one of the columns in your report results, however when exported into Excel, this is formatted as simple text. This means that it does not automatically launch a user to policyIQ, but rather has to be copied and pasted out into the browser. Insert a new column in your report results, and use this simple formula to adjust text into hyperlinks: =HYPERLINK(B2) B2 is simply the cell that contains the URL.  Copy the formula the entire way down that new column to the bottom of your results, and now all of your rows have an active hyperlink to launch to the policyIQ page. 6. Separate a Multi-Select field into separate columns with an X to fill in the blanks Do you have a multi-select field in your content somewhere that you'd prefer to pull apart into its component answers in your report results? A good example of this might be the Financial Statement Assertions on your Risks and/or Controls. You probably have a multi-select field, but you might find it more convenient to evaluate your data if you can pull those apart to see X's in individual columns where that Financial Statement Assertion applies. There are a couple of ways to go about it, but based on my own trial and error experience, I've found that the following process works great. A. Add columns to your report results worksheet - one column for each of the Financial Statement Assertions (or other multi-select value that you wish to separate out). B. In each of those columns, you be using a formula to determine if that specific Financial Statement Assertion is included for this row. That formula is: =IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("Completeness",I2)),"X","") "Completeness" is the value or text that you are looking for. I2 is the cell in which you are looking for that value - or the original column of data from your policyIQ report results. "X" is the text that you wish to see in the new column if the text is found. You'll notice that the last item in the formula is "" - indicating that if the value is not found, no text should be entered. And remember that you can always copy a formula the entire way down the column in your spreadsheet simply by dragging the lower right corner of any cell.  The formula will automatically adjust to look for the correct cell, such as I3, I4, etc in our example. 7. Remove duplicated / repeated content in your Detail Link Report (ie "Risk Control Matrix") A Detail Link Report shows the relationships between content. The most common use of this type of report is a Risk Control Matrix, so you may show the Risks in the first column, and then all of the linked Controls in the second column. If a single Risk has five linked Controls, the exported Excel version of the report will repeat the Risk information five times (into five rows) followed in each row by one of the Controls. You might prefer to see blank cells in those first columns if the Risk is repeated, so here is an easy way to identify which Risks ARE repeated and delete all of those repeats: A. Add a column to your report beside either the Page ID for your Risks. (If you haven't included Page ID in the report results, you can use Reference Number or Name - whatever is always unique for each Risk.) B. In that new column, enter the following formula to determine if the Risk is a duplicate of the line above it: =IF(A2=A1,"Duplicate","") A2 is the cell representing the Page ID (or Reference Number or Name) of the Risk in that row, while A1 represents the Page ID of the Risk in the row above it. Duplicate will appear if the two cells are identical, meaning that the row is a duplicate and the data can be cleared. C. Once you have identified all of the duplicate rows, you can sort on that row - and then highlight all of the duplicate cells, right-click and choose to "Clear contents". D. Do not simply delete the rows! Remember that you do want to see the Control information in the columns further to the right in the spreadsheet. You just want to clear the duplicate contents.   policyIQ Reports module gives you the power and flexibility that you need to pull out data for analysis or presentation, but we know that many of you rely on the formatting capabilities of Excel to create the great looking reports that you distribute externally.  We hope that these tips can make those formatting tasks a bit quicker!  As always, if you have any questions, please contact our support team. What tips do you have for formatting your reports?  Any ideas that you want to share in comments that help you to create spectacular report results? Posted Oct 27 2010, 03:17 PM by chrisburd with no comments Filed under: tips, reports

• Learning to Utilize Reports will help you get the most from policyIQ

  Last Thursday, we dedicated our monthly CPE training event to the subject "Utilizing Reports to get the most from policyIQ".  While we have recorded training sessions aimed at the teaching users how to create reports, we wanted to take a different approach in our live session and talk to our users about how to answer questions using reports. There are two things you should ask yourself before you create a report Not everyone finds creating reports a fun way to pass the time, unlike your author.  One of the key points that came out of the training session was a thought process that anyone can use to get started on their reports.   Essentially, that process requires that you ask yourself two questions before you start to build your report: What question do I need my report to answer? What am I going to do with the answer once I have it? If you have those two pieces of information in front of you, you're ready to get started! Filter to get your answer - and add Columns for the detail you need to take action With those two pieces of information, you start to build Filters - narrowing down the results that your report will bring back and giving you the "answer".  Then add Columns to your report, so that you have all of the detail provided in the final report that you need to take the next step and take action on that answer. For example, let's say that we're managing a project or initiative - and we're using policyIQ to track all of the tasks that need to be completed.  We have a status meeting in a few hours, so we need to run some reports to take into that meeting.  Tips and Hints! There were a few tips or hints shared during our training session that we think are worth sharing with everyone: Do you need to report on items that are "past due" or that occurred in the past? Any Date field can be filtered in a number of ways, including choosing to look for items where the date is "on or before" a specified date. But if you want to run your report more than once for all items where that date is in the past, consider adding a filter for the "Last 9999 Days". With that filter in place, you can run the report again and again, but never have to change your filters. Use the NOT filter! In our training session, we used an example of looking for items where the Status was incomplete. Our Status field had four dropdown choices: Not Started, In Progress, On Hold and Complete. Rather than selecting all three of the other choices, we selected "Complete" as our filter. Back on our main Report Editor, we simply clicked on the "Complete" filter and dragged it below the radio buttons into a new set of filters. We changed the radio button from AND to NOT, and now we had a filter looking for everything where the Status was NOT "Complete".  (See illustration below.) Questions from the audience What a great audience!  We asked for participation in a number of places throughout the session - asking our audience to give us some examples of different reports that they might need to create.  We had several really great questions that we thought we'd take a moment to answer here for everyone. When you export a Summary Report, does the detail also get exported? We created examples of both Detail and Summary reports in our training class.  Detail reports are qualitative lists of content (or lists of content and their relationships to each other) with columns that show you the detail of each item.  Summary reports are quantitative reports, showing you the results numerically across your chosen parameters.  You can drill into a Summary report to get to the detail, if desired. You can export either type of report to Excel, however when exporting a Summary report, the export will show you only the quantitative distribution.  You can export the detail behind it, though, using this trick: In the lower right hand corner of every Summary report you will see the grand total of records in that report.  If you click on that number, you'll be taken to a Detail report that lists all of those records.  You can export this Detail report, as well. So the answer to the question is "not directly" - but you can get to the same Details and export that separately! When looking at a date to go back from, does it include that date also? If you are using a filter to show items in the past and using the filter for "On or Before", the results will include items where the date equals your starting date.  For example, "On or Before 10/26/2010" will include all items where the date is 10/26/2010 and also items where the date is earlier than 10/26/2010.   Want to catch up on the materials? If you weren't able to join us last week, but you'd like to catch up with the materials that we presented, here are some quick links to take you there. Check out the recording of the session that is now available on our policyIQ Training page. Review the Reports section of the policyIQ online Help guide. Review the slides from our training session. As always, contact our support team if you have any questions or if we can help you with a specific report! Posted Oct 26 2010, 10:15 AM by chrisburd with no comments Filed under: tips, Training, reports, features

• policyIQ can save the world! One tree at a time.

  OK, so maybe "save the world" is a bit of an exaggeration.  policyIQ can definitely help your organization reduce their carbon footprint by going paperless; while at the same time, save your organization money and increase productivity and efficiency. Don't believe me? Let's look at a few of the ways that policyIQ can help your organization to reduce the use of paper across your business. Store electronic copies of documents. Not only does electronic storage of documents reduce the amount of paper being printed, it also allows for easier searching capabilities, which in turn reduces time spent looking for information. Not to mention that it increases document security, reducing the risk of information falling into the wrong hands.. (And don't forget to make sure that any originals are being shredded and recycled!) Electronic forms. No more overflowing filing cabinets or binders! Electronic forms be used for things like collecting sign-offs on policies, controls or compliance questionnaires - or even for daily business processes like New User Setup Requests to your IT department or Check Requests that go to accounts payable. With everything stored electronically, you can easily report on this information too! Map, design and manage all business processes electronically. This allows an organization to automate their workflow, which in turn increases efficiencies in the workplace and cuts down on paper trail. The ability for employees across the globe to access this information is just an added bonus! Did You Know? Organizations continue to print, copy and fax more than a trillion pages of office paper each year. (Infotrends) Organizations use paper printouts to archive 62% of important documents. (CNN, 3-28-2010) Americans discard more than 4 million tons of office paper every year - enough to build a 12 foot high wall of paper from New York to California. (American Forest & Paper Association, 2004) What prompted this blog post? This Thursday, October 28, 2010 is AIIM's World Paper Free Day. They are asking you to commit one day to: Conscientiously make a point to not PRINT Investigate a business process or technology that can cut the paper waste in your office Participate or produce a local Paper Free Day event Are you looking for other ideas to help you go paperless at work? Check out some of my suggestions below: Add Think Before You Print to your email signature. Instead of printing a web page, save it as a Favorite or email (yourself or others) a link to the page. Use a site like Evernote to capture and organize everything that's noteworthy! Ask vendors to stop mailing invoices and only send them electronically. Consider digitizing your signature! Do you have any additional suggestions for making the world as "Paper Free" as possible?  Share those recommendations with our readers in the comments!   Posted Oct 25 2010, 04:07 PM by jenkohlman with no comments Filed under: electronic forms, electronic storage, carbon footprint, business processes, automate workflow

• Easily Monitor Contract Variables, Deliverables, Milestones, Reporting Dates, End Dates and more!

  I was thinking, this morning, about our Legal and Supply Chain customers who have asked us about Contract Management and how to make use of policyIQ for monitoring and compliance. Then, I was thinking about how the tools and practices for monitoring typical contracts can really apply to all sorts of agreements. Want more info on Contract Management? We met for a CPE web session a couple of months ago to talk about the use of policyIQ for contract management.  (Click this link to see the video recording of the session.)  While we're talking this month about amplifying your use of policyIQ to take advantage of those features that demonstrate it is much more than a document repository, I thought I'd remind you of those actionable pieces of information that you can get to easily by using reports. You've heard the saying: "Garbage in = garbage out." In any case where we're highlighting the power of reporting, keep in mind that your reports are only as good as the information that you're tracking. You not only have to be capturing the information in order to be able to report on it, but some field types lend themselves to more reliable results than others. Use List fields (Drop down or multi-select) and give authors of your content a set of choices where possible. This eliminates the data integrity issues caused by misspellings, typographical errors, abbreviations and so on.  Date, currency, and whole number fields are okay, too. Text fields are the least reliable for reporting, but they certainly do have their place and usefulness. Just think critically about what you want to get out before you decide how to lead others to put information in! What tasks are you responsible for that require you to track down information? Consider the information that we're putting in and how this can be useful for producing actionable report results for all types of audiences tracking and monitoring contracts or agreements. Here's some food for thought: Legal - monitoring all contracts: Build a Detail Page Report filtering for all pages created from all Contract or Agreement-related Templates. These Templates might have a Drop Down field that indicates the stage of the agreement (Proposal, In Negotiation, Active, Renewal Review/Re-negotiation, Expired) or you may choose to simply Delete expired contracts and agreements so that only active agreements are returned in your Report results.  (Remember that "Deleted" pages may be reported on if you choose to select the relative Stage filter and pages will continue to reside in your policyIQ site until they are "Permanently Deleted".) Staffing Agreements - Report on Staffing Agreements (filter #1) with a specified End Date (filter #2) within your Department (filter #3) and be sure to include Compensation Amount as a field on the Template and within the Columns of your report to help you accurately budget resources for the upcoming quarter. Use filters to review all Staffing Agreements with an Employee Start Date in the coming 30 days so that you can ensure that they receive the appropriate New Hire Packet of paperwork. Customer Agreements - Use filters to narrow down to your Customer Agreements and filter further to see only those with a Projected Annual Revenue over a specified dollar amount. This report will help your team to focus on your high priority customers. Vendor Contracts - Narrow down one of your Vendor reports to those with Milestone Dates within the last 30 days and be sure to include the Deliverables or Commitments field, so that you can review and hold your vendors/suppliers accountable. Partner Agreements - Report on Partner Agreements from a number of perspectives to 1) ensure that both parties are meeting the agreement, 2) prepare in plenty of time to renegotiate the agreement if necessary, and 3) Determine if you wish to renew the agreement upon the contract expiration date. Maybe you already have agreements in policyIQ and are not sure how to construct the reports to get at the information that is most valuable to your team. Or, you might wonder how to build the Templates to most effectively capture the information that will lead to more streamlined management of your contracts and agreements. We have a number of people ready and waiting to troubleshoot and brainstorm with you. Give us a call: 1.866.753.1231. If you prefer, you can email us at support@policyIQ.com. Posted Oct 22 2010, 07:18 AM by stepheniebuehrle with 1 comment(s) Filed under: reports, contract management, supply chain management

• Calling all Reporting Nerds! Use these tips to share your hard work and make everyone more efficient!

  I am going to admit something about myself that very few people know.  I'm kind of a nerd.*  I love creating reports and analyzing data.  I create spreadsheets and databases for fun.  I know that most people don't think in terms of database tables, filters and queries.  They don't lie awake at night wondering how complex the database structure of Facebook must be - or spend an entire weekend building a custom database to inventory her personal library with ratings, reviews and ISBN numbers.** I'm a minority, but I also know that I'm not alone.  Stand proud, fellow Data Nerds!  While your coworkers might tease you for the Excel spreadsheet you've created to keep track of your DVD collection, you are also the first place they go when they need help grabbing the right data. Share reports efficiently - and answer the same questions less frequently! policyIQ is designed to be a collaborative tool - and that's true in Reports, as it is in all other areas of the application.  If you're the resident Reporting Nerd in your organization, you can share your hard work with other members of your organization to save them time and headaches - and ultimately save yourself from being asked the same questions over and over again. Here's a few tips to get the most of your time and energy: Create site-wide report Categories In version 6.7, we've introduced the ability to create site-wide Categories. (Until 6.7, Categories were always specific to each user. Now they can be shared with all users.) Create some Categories for your users to make it easier to find specific Reports. You might create reports based on usage (Sarbanes-Oxley, Account Reconciliation, Contract Management, etc); or based on the frequency that the reports might be run (Monthly Reports, Quarterly Reports, Annual Reports, On-going Status Reports.) What Categories you establish should be based on how your organization uses policyIQ - and what will make the most sense to your users. Add Administrators or Viewers to critical reports - or to basic examples If you've created a report that would be valuable to others, add those individuals (or the Group to which they belong) to the Administrators or Viewers property of the report. Administrators are able to make edits to the filters. If you don't want any non-nerdy types messing with your report filters, you may prefer to simply add them as Viewers. Viewers can run the report, but they cannot make any changes to the original Filter or Column selections. Utilize the Description field to explain your report, how to use it or how to customize it If you do share a report with other users, use the Description field to add context to the report. The twenty filters that you've added make perfect sense to you - but to someone who doesn't think in terms of data, it might not be clear. And if the report is something that is beneficial to others in slightly revised version - such as changing a Folder filter or a date range - explain how the report can be revised for those situations. With shared reports already available, clear explanations and Categories that make everything easy to find, our Reporting Nerds can empower their fellow coworkers to retrieve their own answers and save everyone time and money!  And who knows, maybe one of those coworkers is an undercover Nerd who just needs a little guidance and experience. What happens when the Reporting Nerd needs help?  Reach out to the policyIQ support team!  The ultimate Data Nerds*** are here to help you create what you need.  We won't even tell anyone that we helped!  You get all the credit.   *    I'm told that this is actually quite common knowledge.  Sorry, my bad. **   It wasn't the WHOLE weekend.  It was actually just one Saturday. *** Go ahead and tell them I said that.  They won't mind. Posted Oct 18 2010, 02:21 PM by chrisburd with 1 comment(s) Filed under: tips, reports, features

• Attention HR colleagues: get more work done in less time!

  We’re focusing this month on the value of reporting tools to better gather, analyze and stay on top of your work, but let’s step back for a minute and talk about how to put your ducks in a row leading up to the usefulness of reports. Maintain, update and share your content more efficiently If your organization is not already, consider tracking your policies and procedures in policyIQ. Take advantage of online, shared authoring capability, version control, centralized access, routed review and approval and so on. Do you have a reliable place to maintain, update and redistribute documents that are important to your employees, such as information related to benefits and resources available to them? Do you have a means for easily compiling this information in an Employee Handbook that can be shared company-wide electronically for free or easily printed, if that be your preference? Use as a repository with managed workflow for document sharing really accounts only for the most basic application of policyIQ. Once you have realized the advantages of automating the upkeep and communication of key information in your organization, you can open the doors to significantly improve the effectiveness and efficiency of how you carry out the work behind all of that documentation! Think about the steps that you must take today to inventory your documentation or policies and procedures related to a particular area of your business. Then you have to work through the process of getting the word out to process owners to update their relative documentation so that it continues to reflect what actually happens in the work place. How do they route their changes to appropriate reviewers? Do they always know who those reviewers should be? Does the documentation sometimes get lost in the shuffle on someone’s desk or in their email? Learn how to look at your information in new ways--critical information at your fingertips! In our upcoming CPE training session on Thursday, October 21st, you will learn how you can manage such information in policyIQ, build relative reports and then save those reports to your “Favorites” so that, at a click of a button, you can begin acting on information in an instant going forward. Use reports to easily answer these Human Resources related questions: Are all of the “New Hire” policies up to date? Is all content in the Employee Handbook up to date? Which HR policies have not been reviewed in the last 18 mos? Which Policies and Procedures are due for review and updating in the coming 60 days? Additionally, if you utilize policyIQ for contract management or tracking, you could easily monitor and maintain related deliverables. Reports make it simple for you to: Review the current list of contract employees, their departments, and agreed upon deliverables. Determine which employees have staffing contracts expiring in the next 60 days. And, the use of policyIQ to manage initiatives or projects would further allow you to: Report on the status of the contract employee’s deliverables and whether milestones have been met on time and on budget. This is just a small sample of processes that could be automated and streamlined using policyIQ Reports which might pertain to your Human Resources group. We’d be happy to talk to you in more detail about how to transition your manual processes into policyIQ and how to further utilize the features of policyIQ to work more efficiently. Let us know what you’re working on and we’ll help you to pick up the pace!    Posted Oct 15 2010, 03:15 PM by stepheniebuehrle with no comments Filed under: reports, Human Resources

• Risk Control Matrix: A common report takes on some uncommon challenges

  My dad is a high school teacher.  It's hard to ask him a "quick question", because he prefers to teach you how to find the answer rather than to just give it to you.  Sometimes he can be the most frustrating man in the entire world.  (Just ask my mother.  She'll agree.) As it turns out, I am a lot like my father.  If you ask me how to create a Risk Control Matrix report in policyIQ, I am likely to ask twenty questions first.  I could give you an answer, but it wouldn't be the best answer.  When it comes to reporting, it is important to understand what the questions are that you are really trying ask your data to answer.  In all cases below, a Risk Control Matrix report will use the Detail Link report type in policyIQ.  (And remember that we use the terminology of "Risks" and "Controls", which can easily be substituted for your "Objectives" and "Activities".)  Let's think about some of the questions that this common report might answer, including some uncommon perspectives. What are our Risks and Controls?  Okay, so this is a really basic question, but it needs to be answered.  I think of this as the "big picture" report.  While you can look into your Folders in policyIQ to review the details of the Risks and related Controls, a single report to show all of those linked together is a great way to see the big picture.  Your external auditors might ask to see all of your Risks, sorted by Business Process, and the Controls that you have in place to mitigate them. For this report, you'll likely have just two data sets.  Data Set 1 will use a Template filter for all Risks in your organization, while Data Set 2 will filter for the Controls.  Remember to add the appropriate Columns to the report.  Most organizations use policyIQ Folders to capture Business Processes. If you need to sort by Business Process, be sure to include a Column for Folders in your report.  There are lots of variations on this simple question: What are the Risks and the Key Controls in place to mitigate them? Filter Data Set 2 further by limiting to the Control Template Field of "Significance" to just those that are "Key". What are the Significant Risks and the related Controls? Filter Data Set 1 to the Template Field of "Risk Significance" to just those that have a "High" or "Significant" value. What are your Risks, Controls and Test Plans across the organization? If Test Plans are part of the data request, include Data Set 3 and add a filter for pages from the Test Template. (Some organizations have separate Test Plan pages, which might be included.) Select your Columns to show just the test planning information and not the most current testing results; this data request isn't about the testing results, just the plans in place to do the testing. What are the Risks and Controls for my Business Process? Process Owners want to review their documentation from time to time.  (Okay, so Audit Directors WANT them to review their documentation from time to time.)  Filter the standard Risk Control Matrix for a single Business Process - and provide an overview for your Process Owner.  Make the process owner an Administrator on the report - and suggest that he/she save it to Favorite Reports for easy access. Am I over-controlled or under-controlled? You can start to answer this question with this simple Risk-Control Matrix.  Make sure that your Risks to Financial Statement Assertions are adequately addressed by your controls (include Financial Statement Assertions as Columns in your results), and in those cases where they are addressed many times over, consider if some of those Controls may be downgraded to non-key.  If you want more information about Control Rationalization, check out our recent Risk Assessment blog post and training session. All of these reports are coming from a risk-based perspective.  That's most common, but it's not unheard of to want to see your reporting from the control perspective.  Get wild and crazy!  Flip around your data sets!  Data Set 1 can filter for Controls, while Data Set 2 might filter for the Risks. What Risks are vulnerable because of Deficiencies identified in our organization? Ooh, good question!  This is what your testing is all about, right - where are we left vulnerable?  This can be a fun one to put together, too.  Start with your Deficiencies.  If you don't have a separate page for Deficiencies, start with Test pages that have a "Failed" status. Data Set 1: Filter for Deficiencies identified in the designated period of time.  (Likely to be this testing year.) Data Set 2: Filter for the Test pages. Data Set 3: Filter for the Control pages. Data Set 4: Filter for the Risk pages. This report - with four data sets of linked information and lots of great information - will provide you with the list of Risks that are left exposed by the Deficiencies that have been identified.  But is this the whole picture?  Some of those Risks might have additional or compensating Controls in place.  So... Data Set 5: Filter for Control pages.  Again? Crazy, I know.  Data Set 3 will only show the Control that is linked to that failed Test.  But with this last data set, you can check to see if there is more than one Control in place that mitigates the Risk.  If so, you might decide that there is no vulnerability here.  You're covered with another Control. What is the complete Test Plan for this Business Process? I've heard this question asked by many testers who are tasked with testing a complete process.  Before they dig in and get started, they'd like to take a look at the "big picture".  Like we mentioned above, they could look page by page, but there's something about pulling it all together that can make the information easier to digest. For a tester, though, they rarely want to start at the Risk level.  Instead, they are more interested in the individual Tests that they are expected to complete - and how it rolls up into the big picture. Data Set 1: Filter for the Test pages in that particular Business Process.  (Again, this is often based on a Folder, so be sure to add the appropriate filters.) Data Set 2: Filter for Controls. Date Set 3: Filter for Risks. When you add Risks or Controls to your report, be sure to add columns that indicate the Business Process that they fall into.  In some cases, a Control or Risk might fall into more than one process.  Your tester will want to know that - and possibly even verify that the Test isn't duplicative of something someone else is working on.   What do YOU want to know about your Risks, Controls, Tests, Deficiencies or Action Plans? You'll often hear us tell you that your ability to report in policyIQ is limited only by your imagination.  We know that's not entirely true, but there are so many possibilities for powerful reports that we can't possibly tell you about them all.  Instead, let us work with you.  If you aren't sure how to create the report you need, contact us by email or give us a call and let us help you to ask the right questions.  Oh, and I apologize in advance if I sound like a 9th grade math teacher as I help you to "learn how to do it on your own next time".  It's genetic. Posted Oct 06 2010, 07:39 PM by chrisburd with no comments Filed under: SOX, tips, reports, best practices, internal audit, sarbanes-oxley, risk assessment

• Keeping tabs on all of Your Deliverables and Responsibilities

  IT Manager, Human Resources Generalist, Accountant, Ops Supervisor, EH&S Director…no matter your role in your organization, you have to stay on top of your deliverables and monitor the outputs and outcomes of your team at some level. Do you have a trick for staying on top of it all without overlooking anything? If so, let us all know what that is!! I’m not satisfied with my Outlook Tasks, my color-coded notes and calendar items, my special “to do” folders and on and on. One tool that comes in very handy is real-time reporting in policyIQ. If I have procedures to review and update, project dates coming up, tasks that need to be completed and so on, I can set up a handful of reports in policyIQ that I can run on a weekly basis to help me keep track of those things that I need to focus on sooner rather than later. If you’re not yet using policyIQ to help you with oversight of your various tasks and deliverables, you should probably stay tuned and see how you can take advantage of these simple tools at your fingertips! Don’t let anything sneak past you -- “Change” reports. Remember those Ginsu commercials? (“How’s that for a clever cleaver?”) Well, at the risk of sounding like a Ginsu commercial, I can’t say enough about the power of policyIQ’s Change report filters. And when you pair them with other types of report filters, there’s almost an endless supply of tools to help you watch over your work. Use Any Change to create a report of Process Narratives that have changed in the last quarter.  Use the Item Field Changed filter to see if any of your customers was changed from Low to High Risk or to see if any procedures were changed from “as needed” to something more regular, like “weekly”. Check to see if an Attachment [was] Added to any Project Proposals. Wait, there’s more! Was the Approval Withheld on any pending Contracts? Have your testers Checked In their tests for review? And these are just 5 of 29 different Change Report options! Have a few extra minutes between meetings? Plan ahead for work on “Expired Pages”. Within the “Dates” filter option and Expiration Date filter drop down choice, look into which Pages that you or your team members are responsible for that are set to expire in the Next 30 Days. You can identify those Pages that do not require changes and “Renew Expiration” in bulk. You can also Check Out Pages directly from the report results and make necessary changes to your Pages before republishing.  You could filter your report on those Pages that expired On or Before the first of this month and follow up with those Administrators who have not yet updated or renewed the Expiration Date on their Pages. Where are our Test Pages in the review and approval process? Not only can you use Template Field filters to zero in on Test Pages with a status of “In Progress” (if you have this Field and Choice added to your Test Template), but you could also filter your results on those Pages that are still in development; Checked Out To Me, Checked Out To Others, or Available for Checkout. In what stage of review are your Pages? To whom are the Pages checked out to at this time? Does it seem that the Approval process is stalled? Do you need to make adjustments to your workflow to keep the process moving efficiently? Explore Stages filters to streamline your workflow. Not your home-grown repository. Take advantage of reporting options! We have used all kinds of methods to track our documents and processes, procedures and specifications, deliverables and tasks, to do’s and “watch outs”. While some repositories have a search feature, few hold a candle to the multi-filter capability, ability to customize the columns in your output and several viewing (and exporting) options of policyIQ Reports. Take a few minutes to explore your Reports module and discover the might of the numerous filtering options! (Did I lie that on too thick? Really, you just can’t believe how much information is at your fingertips! ) Let us know if we can help you to slice and dice your data and help you to stay on top of your deliverables. If you’re still feeling like you don’t know what you don’t know about Reports, join us for our upcoming CPE training session where we’ll travel around the Reports module and see what’s in it for you! Posted Oct 04 2010, 12:23 PM by stepheniebuehrle with no comments Filed under: tips, reports, project management