Ellis Pratt of Cherryleaf and Malcolm Tullett of Risk and Safety Plus Ltd will be presenting a short case study on “Using Confluence for generating field reports” at the 19 April 2011 meeting of the London Atlassian User Group.
The meeting is being held at The National Archives in Kew, Richmond. It’s free to attend – see the event and booking details.
By guest blogger Malcolm Tullett
Every organisation contains knowledge, but how well does your business handle it? Is there a single place of truth where everything that is needed resides – or do you lose information when someone leaves, is away on holiday or sick, or moves up to a higher position?
More to the point – do you KNOW what you’re losing?
Every organisation needs to have a strategy to handle its knowledge risks. Not only to record systems and processes, but to store information on a wide variety of functions. Ideally, that system also needs to have the flexibility to grow with the organisation, and handle change and improvement too.
There is a cliché ‘knowledge is power’; but that implies exclusivity of knowledge and in today’s world protecting your personal knowledge doesn’t help the organisation to function effectively – in fact, quite the reverse.
Today’s world is based on sharing openly for the benefit of your environment, whether that’s family, community or employer. Just look at the explosion of social media – all based on sharing information and knowledge.
How does your organisation stand up to the knowledge risks?
We welcome our latest guest blogger, Malcolm Tullett. He runs a fire, safety and environmental consultancy and training company called Risk and Safety Plus, and is the creator of PROPA.
Malcolm’s mission is to spread the word that risk and good business are not mutually exclusive – they are simply two sides of the same coin. He’ll be blogging about business processes and communicating change within an organisation.
PROPA is a concept that won an Institute of Engineering Technology (IET) award for innovation. It has now been developed into a online intelligent operations manual that drives efficiency and effectiveness whilst seamlessly addressing compliance. PROPA presents end-to-end process mapping that enables you to analyse risk areas before an event and has the capability to actively change a process to mitigate risk and deliver quality data for business operations. Contact us for more details.
Welcome Malcolm!
Some industry sectors, such as finance, often require strict adherence to specific policies and procedures. Compliance departments have to ensure these are kept up to date and accessible, from both a legal and industry perspective.
The problem is that governance can be expensive, really expensive.
Unfortunately, the volume of written content continues to explode, and the regulatory demands are increasing year by year. The traditional linear based approach to writing documents is part of the problem: it takes ages for auditors to go through all the documents to check if inefficiencies, errors and potential risks can be identified, averted or contained. It’s getting harder to manage, and it’s costing more.
Manufacturers, such as Dyson, face similar regulatory pressures, in that they have to prove each product they sell is certified safe to use. With a large product range, that can involve a lot of time and effort to prove that’s the case.
One of the approaches manufacturers take to address this problem is to break a product down into a series of components. They then reuse the same component, such as a wheel on a vacuum cleaner, across a range of products. Once the wheel is certified for use, they can include that certificate when they submit their application for the new product.
In a similar way, it’s possible to break documents down into a series of individual components that are re-used to build pages or documents. As the same component is used in lots of documents, by fixing one component you’re also fixing all the documents that include that component.
Compliance teams love the ability these systems provide for an audit trail. They can identify where particular pieces of text are used – tasks, procedures, paragraphs, even sentences and phrases, when it was changed and by whom.
By adopting a component-based approach to Compliance documentation, it means the business can audit and manage documentation, quickly and efficiently - slashing the time needed to check if documents are compliant with the latest regulations.