29 October 2006

Taming the email monster : devising a system for managing emails effectively

Introduction


This is a transcription of a presentation I gave to a recent conference on email management. The views expressed in it are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my organisation.

In January 2006 we introduced an email management policy to try to manage emails better within our ERM system. The loud noise you may be able to hear during this presentation is possibly the sound of the stable door slamming after the horse has bolted.

At the risk of mangling my metaphors, we called our email management project ‘Taming the email monster’ but I often wonder whether we should have called it, ‘Flogging a dead horse’.

I don’t think records managers have covered themselves in glory over the management of emails. As a profession we didn’t decide on our approach until it was far too late. We neither knew nor understood the impact email would have on all of our working lives; so now we are playing catch-up. And to be honest, I sometimes wonder if it may be too little too late. We are only now trying to change habits and working practices that people have developed over the last ten years or more. And it is an extremely difficult to thing to do. We may well be fighting a losing battle.

As records managers we were very slow to develop policies and procedures for managing email. We did not address the problem. And so everyone has now developed their own ways of working with email and may be extremely resistant to any changes we now wish to impose. One of our biggest problems is that most people now believe their email accounts belong to them and not to the organisation they work for.

The answer may well lie in using technology to help us rather than expending an incredible amount of time and energy trying to change people’s deeply ingrained working practices. We will undoubtedly have to keep our eyes fixed firmly on the horizon so that we don’t make the same mistake with future technologies as we did with email management. But, of course we don’t know what the IT / records management world will look like in three, four or five years time.

The organisations we work for need to be able to manage their records to understand the corporate memory but we have people working solely from their own email folders. And this information, saved in individual email accounts, is not accessible to the rest of the organisation. This means that there are often holes in an organisation’s knowledge bank. Individual members of staff know what is going on but the organisation may not. You end up with a lack of corporate memory; what I call Corporate Alzheimer’s Disease. The organisation’s corporate memory is sporadic, patchy and inconsistent. And this is not acceptable.

We need to bring in a corporate email policy addressing everything we need to do to manage email within our organisations. This policy has to include what to save as a record, retention scheduling, controlled access to data, protection of private information and how to manage your own email account. Done properly a corporate email policy will help your users to manage their email effectively and the inevitable result of this will be that your corporate memory will improve and your Outlook servers will not get overloaded.

When you devise your email management policy you will need to think about your strategy and how you will go about it. What are the possible solutions?

We identified three.


Limiting the mailbox size

One of the most effective ways of getting people to manage their email accounts is by limiting their mailbox size. You can force compliance by stopping them from being able to send or receive email if their mailboxes are above a certain limit. This will concentrate their minds.

Clean slate policy

The second option is to auto-archive everyone’s email accounts and give them all new, blank account which you expect them to manage properly from that point onwards.

Archiving emails after x months

The third option is to archive / delete emails that are over a certain age (usually 3 or 6 months).

With the last two options you have to make sure that your users have absolutely clear guidance on what they should save into your ERM system and what they should do with ephemeral emails. You must remind them regularly of their obligations.

As soon as you bring in any kind of email management policy you run the risk of people deleting stuff they are not supposed to delete. And anyway, you are absolving your users of their responsibility to manage their manage their records properly. They don’t have an incentive to do it if you are going to come along and do it for them. If you automatically archive email you still need to apply retention and disposal schedules to it. You won’t be able to spend the rest of your life going through every email you have archived so you would have to give your archived emails a very long retention schedule…which kind of defeats the object.

We decided on a policy of limiting the mailbox size as it seemed to be the best solution for us. Even with this solution you must educate and frequently reiterate what you expect people to do.

Our policy began in January 2006 and ran for six months until 06/06/06. D-day; or e-day as we called it. 666 is also the number the beast so we called it ‘taming the email monster’.

We had a clear programme of events with regular updates, information and newsletters. Each month we reminded people what they should do and by when. We wanted a people to get into the habit of managing their emails regularly. And a lot of people did it. And they were the ones who have subsequently told me that they now feel that they are in control of their emails – not the other way around. But, of course, not everyone did what we wanted them to do. If I say, ‘you’ll never guess what happened’, I think perhaps you will.

A high proportion of people left it until the last minute. And we had hundreds of people trying to move hundreds of thousands of emails on the last two days. No surprises then that our systems overloaded and fell over. Our marvellous IT staff gave us lots more server space in ERM and we were only down for about half an hour.

You must make sure you have rules for everything and that you communicate these rules regularly. You cannot afford to assume that everyone will suddenly change the way have been working for the last five or ten years just because you ask them to. You have to persuade, educate, cajole and, in some cases, be prepared to use the efficiency carrot and the compliance stick to get your users to do what you want.

We decided on a 200MB mailbox limit and agreed that everyone above this limit could receive but not send email after 06/06/06.

I think the policy has, by and large, been a success. The vast majority of people are managing their email accounts better. Some people have even thanked me because they are now in charge of their emails rather than the other way around. And some people have said, ’200MB is far too many you should get it down to 100MB’. Maybe I will.

We also managed to clear up a vast amount of space from the email servers. Our IT section thanked me for doing something they had been trying to do - but not succeeding - for years.

I’m sure that our corporate memory is much healthier than it was as we’ve got thousands and thousands more emails in our ERM system.

Conclusions

This is not the end of the story. Far from it. Managing emails effectively is, and it has to be, a process. One exercise won’t get people acting, thinking and working differently. It has to be an ongoing process of education, cajoling and re-enforcement.

There are other weapons in our armoury too. We need to be able to enshrine everything in our information management policy. This needs to seen as a set of instructions rather than as a series of guidelines. And the more you can automate these instructions the better.

But we also need our ERM systems to work smarter too. At the moment it is very ‘clunky’ to save emails into our ERM system. Drag and drop is OK but it is really a stop-gap solution, in my opinion. Ideally, the next generation ERM systems will link seamlessly to Outlook folders. Staff will put emails into their Outlook folders like they do now but they’ll really link back to the ERM system. And they really must be able to handle bulk drag and drop, because some people may want to put thousands of emails into the system...particularly if you bring in an email management system.

So we must be able to engage with the ERM suppliers and make sure they deliver what we need. We must not be passive recipients of their changes / upgrades etc; we need to let them know what we want and get them to deliver it without charging us an arm and a leg. There’s a commercial dichotomy that we have to get control of; our job is to manage our organisation’s records, their job is to sell you stuff. Somehow we have to get them to provide us with the tools we need when we need them at much more affordable prices.

We need to be alive to the challenges of the new technologies that are being developed at what seems to be breath-taking speed. We must develop strategies for managing instant messaging / Blackberrys etc. And the new Sharepoint technologies will give us ‘collaborative space’ and ‘records space.’ How will we manage these technologies? We need to get our strategies and solutions in place now - before we lose these battles too.

We must engage with the new ‘social computing initiatives’ like wikis and blogs. How will we treat them? As collaborative spaces or as record spaces?

Records managers in the 21st Century have to have a number of strings to their bow. And one of them has to be a greater understanding of IT. If we don’t we’ll be left trying to manage systems we don’t understand; trying to get to grips with systems, tools and processes that have evolved without us.

Which is exactly what happened with email management.

Our organisation has come a long way – but we still have to go a lot further before I will be happy that we’ve come to terms with managing the email monster. And we have to be constantly vigilant because other monsters lurk in the shadows.

17 October 2006

Blogroll : Where can I get help and advice?

Looking for help and advice on records management issues?

The National Archives has
a great deal of information and guidance on records management on its websites.

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/services/


You also may find a lot of useful stuff on here... from records management to naming conventions to email management. The list is endless...as is the link...oops.
http://www.pasa.nhs.uk/PASAWeb/NHSprocurement/AboutNHSPASA/Electronicrecordsmanagement/LandingPage.htm

If you are interested in records management you really ought to check out the Records Management Society website... http://www.rms-gb.org.uk/

This new blog (Records management futurewatch) promises great things: http://rmfuturewatch.blogspot.com/

A very interesting and useful view from across the pond
http://aiimknowledgecenter.typepad.com/weblog/





Let me know if you want a link to your website...

15 October 2006

Records management jokes

Yes, there are some...

If I save an MP3 file into my ERM system, does it become a record?

There are 10 different types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.

We are thinking of hosting an annual PICNIC awards ceremony. PICNIC is my acronym for Problem In Chair Not In Computer. All those wonderful things that users say are priceless, aren't they? Here's my current favourite:

RM Right, I've made the changes you just need to press any key to activate them.
PAUSE
RM Ok have you done that?
User Not yet.
RM Why not?
User I can't find the ANY key!











Of course it's well known that computers are hardware and programs are software...but what about humans? A: Wetware.

The Business Classification Scheme


Understanding the Business Classification Scheme

See separate sidebar for links to webpages about Business Classification Schemes

The Business Classification Scheme is another name for the corporate file plan which is our shared file structure in the Electronic Records Management (ERM) System. The Business Classification Scheme determines how records are organised within the ERM system. Records are grouped together for the following reasons:
• to keep documents of a similar theme together
• to make it easier to find the information we are looking for
• to provide a context for individual documents
• to identify the ownership or management responsibility for a group of records
• to ensure documents are destroyed at the correct time

The Business Classification Scheme is hierarchical. At the highest level are what we call Information Series, which represents the high-level business functions of the Agency, next comes Themes, which correspond to the activities which make up the high level functions. These top levels are fixed by the Records Management team and will very rarely be changed.

Naming of files and folders

Folders and files must be given meaningful, relevant and specific titles so that they can be easily found and their contents identified without too much trouble. It is important that the names of folders and files accurately reflect their contents.

For more information see the guidance on Naming Conventions.

Everyone is encouraged to make sure they follow a common filing system across the organisation.

This filing struture must be pre-defined and, popular wisdom has it,'functional'. This means that the file-plan should not be based on the structure of the organisation or on directorates but on functions, the things your organisation does.

This, it is claimed, will make your file-plan more future-proof. The argument is that your organisation may regularly change the way it is structured but is less likely to change the things it does.

I am not entirely convinced by this argument.

A lot of organisations spend a great deal of time and money making sure it has a functional file-plan. Is it really necessary? Well, at the highest of levels the answer is probably a qualified 'yes'. At lower levels the argument is less convincing. The reason being that your users will undoutedly leave their mark on the file-plan. They won't necessarily want to work in a functional way. They are more concerned with the organisation's 'social relationships'; their teams and the people they work with.

As soon as you publish your functional file-plan and let your users loose on it, they will change it into a 'social' file-plan. The old adage about no plan surviving first contact with the enemy applies very well to your Business Classification Scheme.

I must stress that I am not arguing for the aboliton of the functional file-plan but the tempering of it in the 'real-life' world of the way your organisation works. Above all else you must be pragmatic and not insist on fighting battles your users will help you to lose.

Be realistic; your users will work in a way that suits them. You may not be able to change the way they want to save their work. At least not in the short term. And, unless you want to spend the rest of your life creating folders for your users and directly intervening in their day-to-day filing, there's not much you can do about it.

Naming conventions

See separate sidebar for links to wepages about Naming conventions

One of the most difficult things to get across to your users is the need to name their documents and folders correctly. No matter how often you explain this to them, users will insist on naming their work idiosyncratically, erratically, eccentrically and in ways that ensure neither they nor their colleagues can find their work.

It's not rocket science to name your documents and folders properly. Yet I have heard of some classic howlers both in my organisation and outside. My favourites include a series of folders beginning with a person's name (which is always a big no-no). The one we looked in was called Fred. The next level was 'Miscellaneous' inside which was 'General'. The document the user complained he couldn't find was called 'doc1'. And he was complaining to me that he could never find his stuff!!! Aaargh!!! How he decided on which documents should be filed in 'Miscellaneous' and which in 'General' is a complete mystery to me!! And don't get me started on words like 'New' (which is soon out of date) and 'Stuff'!!!

I cannot stress too highly the importance of good naming disciplines. You and all your colleagues will need to find your work at a later date. If you can't remember what you called it, or you put in folders that are obscurely titled, it will be extremely difficult to find.

We use the following guidelines when helping people create their folder and document names.

How to name your folders, files and documents

These are the rules and conventions for naming folders and files, documents and records in the Electronic Records Management (ERM) system.

It is important to think carefully about how you name your documents, records, folders and files because you must be able to search for, and find them, quickly and easily. If you follow these simple rules you will find it easier to name your work and find it when you need it.

General

• always make the name of a folder or record descriptive of its content or purpose
• always ensure the title contains enough information for anyone else to identify it
• always use natural language and spell out words in full – do not use obscure abbreviations, or ‘MSDOS’ style compacted eight letter titles
• always make the name of a file or record descriptive of the whole content. A title should act as a summary of the file or record’s contents.
• do not use abbreviations or acronyms. They often become obsolete over a period of time and can often have more than one meaning. Always write the names of organisations in full and only use an abbreviation when absolutely necessary
• do not put the name of person in the title of a folder, file, document or record. If you must refer to someone always use their job title rather than their name
• never use initials in the title of a folder, file, document or record – always use the role or job title, for example, Chief Executive not CE
• if you want to use a date in a title you must put it at the beginning, using the YYMMDD convention to ensure that documents are stored in date order. For example, a document saved on 24 November 2006 should be saved as 061124 followed by the document name.

Folders and files

• folders and files bring together a set of records about the same activity, topic or transaction. The title must clearly identify this single activity, topic or transaction
• when naming folders, do not duplicate titles from elsewhere in the file plan – search first to see if the title you want to use already exists. If it does exist, this may be the right home for your work otherwise you should think of an alternative name for the file you wish to create

Documents and records

• always ensure the record title is
- specific
- consistent and sensible
- understandable and helpful to others
• always balance helpful description with being concise and formal
• always use formal structured language, rather than informal or ‘funny’ names
• do not include the format of a document in the title (for example, don’t use Word document, or Excel spreadsheet)
• do not include status or version information in the title (the metadata will tell you which version it is.)
• do not include terms that may become obscure or will not help you find it later (for example don’t use terms such as ‘letter1’ or ‘doc1’)
• do not include symbols e.g. %, £, /,\,@ in the title of the document

Naming email

All the comments that apply to documents apply equally to naming email, but there are other things that should be considered. Email titles must accurately describe their content.

• you must change the title of the email if it does not accurately reflect the content
• all instances of ‘FW’ and ‘RE’ should be removed from the title of an email

Managing an Electronic Records Management (ERM) project


Below is a copy of an article I wrote for the Records Management Journal. The views expressed in it are mine and do not necessarily represent the views of my employers.

Bringing in an electronic records management (ERM) system is a long and complex process. Each organisation that undertakes an ERM programme will reach the same milestones but each journey is unique to each organisation. This is because each organisation has a different set of wants and needs and a different set of cultures on which these wants and needs are acting.

There are four clear stages each organisation must go through. The Pre-award stage characterised by everything you need to do before the award of the contract; the Development stage is about the work you have to do behind the scenes once you have the software; the Roll out phase is when the system is being first used by pilot groups and the Evaluation phase is the work you have to do to establish how successful the project has been once everyone is using the ERM system. It’s a complicated tale of learning new skills, frustration and intellectual struggle.

It is a never ending process, even when the whole system is up and running you never stop learning. Learning about the system itself, learning about users’ preferences and learning about how the culture of the organisation works on both the users and the system.

Before we consider the stages of an ERM system I want to look briefly at the culture of my organisation and the tradition of records management that existed at the time.

Culture of record-keeping

The NHS Purchasing and Supply Agency (the Agency) is an executive agency of the Department of Health. It was formed in April 2000 from an old NHS body (the NHS Supplies Authority). The most important thing to note is that there was no culture of corporate record keeping in the Agency. We negotiate contracts on behalf of the NHS. We are responsible for negotiating some of the most important contracts in the NHS. From drugs to medical equipment and MRI scanners, sandwiches, gas and electricity, to stationery and wheelchairs we have usually negotiated the contract. Because we can take advantage of the economies of scale, using the vast buying power of the NHS, we can usually negotiate better deals for the NHS.

We have around 350 staff on four different sites (Reading, Chester, Normanton and Sheffield) including almost sixty home-workers . We have our own Human Resources, Finance and IT sections. Any ERM system we devised had to encompass all of these functions.

A lot of people in the Agency are absolute experts in their chosen field. Unfortunately, what has also happened is that this specialisation and a lack of a records management culture has led to a ‘silo mentality’ where everyone has evolved their own ways of working and there has been little sharing of knowledge and ideas.

This was brought into very sharp relief when we did an information audit. This was my very first task as project manager of the ERM project and it was a chastening experience. Not only did I find that each section worked differently but also that every section believed that their way of working was the best way of doing things and it was everyone else who had the problems.

This was even true of one section where people confessed to not being able to find any of their work so they saved all of their documents in three or four different files; just to be on the safe side. And there was one section who found it difficult to keep track of all the files they’d created so they had a file called “Where is everything?” which was not a very promising beginning.
But it helped to concentrate our minds. We knew that to meet the targets set out in the Modernising Government white paper and to prepare for the introduction of the Freedom of Information Act would be involve a huge cultural change for the Agency. We also knew that if we carried on using the same unstructured systems we had always used it would be virtually impossible to search for and find what we were looking for when we were asked for information under the Freedom of Information Act. We could not afford to let that happen.

So we needed a corporate, structured system that enabled us to search for and find information quickly and effectively; an ERM system that helped us become ‘a centre of knowledge, expertise and excellence on behalf of the purchasing function in the NHS.’ The NHS looks to us for advice and guidance on purchasing matters and so we need to be at the cutting edge of best practice not just in purchasing but in every aspect of what we do. And that also includes records management.

We had to devise something that was our first faltering steps towards being a knowledge sharing organisation instead of tacitly encouraging knowledge ‘silos’ where each section roughly knows what it is doing but no-one else does. The big problem in working in silos is that no-one can see the whole picture; the Agency does not know what the Agency knows. An ERM system helps to break down these artificial but very powerful barriers to change. An ERM system is, therefore, much more than a piece of software – it’s also about cultural change. When you embark on this journey you are inevitably going to change completely the way that people work, think and act. This is by far the biggest challenge and it’s something for which you never stop apologising. People are often very conservative. They don’t like change and they don’t like new computer systems and, more than that, they hate having to think about how they work.

The Pre-award process

The beginning of your project is where the hard work starts. It is the time when you learn the most about what implementing an ERM system is all about. There is much to learn and, for those, like us, who are completely new to ERM the best place to start is The National Archives website which has a great deal of help and advice about where to start and how to proceed.

We devised a complex implementation plan to which we returned every month to score how we’d progressed and check we’d done the right things. And every month we had to change it to reflect the work we had actually done and to incorporate the new work we needed to do. This is the most difficult part of the process because at the start of your project it’s very difficult to know exactly where you are going. It’s almost like having a script you can’t read in the darkness and you can’t switch on the light because you can’t get your blindfold off.

It is important you draw your project group from all functions and specialisms within your organisation. You will also need a range of grades and experience. This will ensure that you get maximum buy-in from your users. It is important that your project group are willing to travel with you. However, you must be prepared to make changes to your project group if they are necessary. The project may take anything up to three years to complete so it is entirely possible that the project group that starts the project won’t be the one that ends it. Do not underestimate the amount of work involved nor the amount of time it will take you. Be prepared to change the group if the dynamic is not working or if people genuinely cannot afford to spend the time doing the necessary work. People have real jobs to do and it would be foolish to believe that everyone can spare the time to work on a very time-consuming project. It may be better, for the long term health of the project, to have a small, dedicated team who do the hard work and a higher level strategy group who rubber stamp key decisions. This method of working may be more effective but balanced against this is the fact that it is much less representative.

Perhaps the most important task at this first stage of the project is to develop the ‘Functional Requirements’ – a document listing everything you want (and need) the ERM system to do.

This can be a slow process as the requirements of such a system are many and complex. The document we drafted ended up being over a hundred pages long with hundreds and hundreds of different criteria drawn from three main sources; TNA, MoReq (the EU standards) and our own particular, idiosyncratic needs. At this stage of the project you may not understand the importance of each of the requirements and you will most certainly have no concept of what they all look like or how they operate in practice but you need to know that your potential suppliers address each and every one of them and tell you how they will work.

You will have to revisit the functional requirements document at regular stages throughout the project to check that the system you get is the one you thought you’d ordered. Information architecture relies on good design and the functional requirements document is your blueprint.

The Development phase

The hard work really starts once you get the software. This is the time when you learn the most about implementing an ERM system. It is where your blueprint

You have to get to know the system, understand its quirks and foibles and learn how everything you put down in your hundred page document actually works. If, like us, you don’t have a budget that accommodates having loads of consultants in to teach you how it works then you’ve got a lot of learning to do. And it’s a very steep learning curve. Before you’re ready for everyone else to be let loose on the system you must know it inside out and back to front yourself. It is no good people coming to you with problems if you don’t know the solutions. It is probably not necessary for IT specialists to become records managers but it is absolutely vital that records managers learn some IT skills.

One of the key building blocks of the ERM system is the corporate file plan (otherwise known as a business classification scheme). This will be difficult to design and even more difficult to implement. It will be very complicated to get people to work more corporately. It becomes even more complex because you may have to challenge their ways of thinking. All the text books tell you the best design for a corporate file plan is based on function rather than individual or team working. This is because functions are less likely to change over time. Moreover, a functional file plan may give you a head start if you need to design and implement a thesaurus. The name of each of your files will form part of the thesaurus.

It will, nevertheless, be easier said than done to get sections to agree on a file plan. For example, one section may tell you they need, for example, administration files. Another section may tell you they definitely don’t want administration files. So, do you put them in or not? There are no easy answers. It’s an extremely difficult job. But, I have to say, the corporate file plan is one of our major successes. Since we brought in we’ve had a major reorganisation and, because we’d done it by function rather than by team or section, I’ve had virtually no work to do on restructuring it.

Nothing sums up our experience of the ERM project better than our retention and disposal schedules. Prior to ERM each section worked to their own disposal principles – but it was not co-ordinated on an Agency–wide basis. Individual areas like HR, finance and purchasing sections had their own individual retention and disposal schedules; the ERM project brought them all together in a single policy for the first time. And now when anyone wants to open up a new file, the system automatically picks up the retention and disposal schedule from its parent. It’s a masterpiece of design because people only have to decide where the file will go and the system automatically picks up the relevant disposal schedule.

Once you have built your system you’ll finally be ready for other people to start using it. This is where your pilot groups come into play. And the old saying that no battle plan survives longer than first contact with the enemy is absolutely true as far as an ERM system is concerned. Once the system leaves the project group and starts being used by other people is where the hard work really starts.

The Roll-out phase

You may find it difficult to get enough teams to volunteer to be in your pilot group. This is partly because they’ll be far too busy to take on a new project and partly because of the fear of the new. In fact it may even be difficult to get some teams fully on board. You will always get people who ask if it is mandatory; if it affects them. Don’t you know that their section is different to the others? It has special requirements and so they cannot use the system like everyone else. Wherever you go the question will always be the same. And so will the answer, of course.

Unfortunately, there has to be an element of compulsion when you bring in an ERM system. If you give people the option of using it or carrying on the way they have always worked they will definitely never, ever choose to work differently. They will always prefer to carry on the way they have always worked. You need to be able to use a mixture of persuasion and compulsion to get people to use the system. You need both carrots and sticks. Or if you’re really clever you can have sticks that look like carrots because, unfortunately, it’s the sticks that work best. You may find that your biggest most effective stick is disabling their old ways of working completely. We tried this and, funnily enough, usage of ERM shot up in the build up to turning of their old drives.

You never know what questions people are going to ask or in what ways they will get themselves into a muddle until they start using the system for themselves. What you think is easy and straightforward, could well be difficult and complicated for everyone else. If you are building an ERM system, you are going to need to write an idiot’s guide to everything. And it’s no good just writing the guides and putting them on an intranet site; you have to tell people they are there. There is absolutely no substitute for communication and quite often the best way to do this is by email. There’s no guarantee, however, that even if you do send them an email they will read it. Your communications plan needs to be sophisticated and wide ranging. One method of communication just won’t be satisfactory.

Email is a very interesting and emotive issue for the records manager. More than any other system, people feel that email systems belong to them. Even if their email folders are full of work-related documents, decisions etc getting them to move email into the ERM system is a big issue. My line has always been consistent; email is a method of communication; not a method of storage – but it’s a message that’s only slowly seeping through. Many decisions are made by email and people’s inboxes often hold more information than their shared drives. Slowly I am getting the message through that the correct place for storing work is ERM not email inboxes. But people are less willing to give up their email folders than they are their shared drives. So you have to try carrot and stick again. We are having an email amnesty day and we intend to start reducing the size of everyone’s email folders. It’s a good way of concentrating people’s minds.

When you’re building the ERM system, one of the most time consuming jobs is making sure that people can work in the areas they need to work but can’t access areas they don’t need. For example, you may not want everyone to be able to see and read all HR, finance or emergency planning files. So you have to take the time to make sure each component part can be accessed by whichever team needs to access it. There are hundreds of files in hundreds of folders so this is not an easy job. But when you do it and you get it right it is as rewarding as the best music or poetry. It’s both a science and an art form.

There is always more to an ERM system than you possibly train people to use. You will, therefore, need to consider what level of training you will give to everyone. A full day’s basic training will be enough. Quite frankly, it was more than enough for some people. You may need to consider having super-users in each section. If you give these people, say, an extra training day’s training they will be able to help out their colleagues. More than that, you will have a champion in each section. Training is, of course, the biggest ongoing commitment and it is where the hard work really begins.

The Evaluation stage

We have now successfully, I think, rolled out our ERM system and everyone is to a greater or lesser extent using it.

We’re just beginning to look at the lessons we have learned from it.

All the text books tell you that it is vital you get senior management buy in to your ERM project. Although it is important, you can implement an ERM without it. It doesn’t pay to have their hostility but you can achieve the desired results if they empower you to produce the results but don’t get personally involved.

The biggest challenge you will undoubtedly face is the massive cultural shift needed to bring in an ERM system. Make no mistake about it, any ERM system is a massive intellectual challenge you need to understand how a new piece of software works , you have to be able to explain this to others and you have to get people to think, act and work differently. You develop skills and knowledge sets you never believed possible.

You will never have enough, or the right, resources, in terms of both money and staff. But if you do it the way we did it, with a small dedicated team, they have to be highly motivated and keep each other going because they’re not going to get much help or thanks from anywhere else.

The installation of an ERM system is always a much bigger task than you ever thought possible. It will take all the time, money and people you can throw at it. It’s a never ending, thankless task and I have loved every single minute of it.

Search This Blog