In this episode of the Cherryleaf Podcast, we look at the steps you need to take if you need to urgently create or update your Business as Usual policies and procedures.
AI-generated transcript:
This is the Cherryleaf podcast
Hello I’m Ellis Pratt I’m one of
the directors and co-owners of Cherryleaf and it’s
March 2020 and at the moment we are in
the UK it’s still in the early stages of
the coronavirus and we thought it would
be useful to do an episode for those
people that are needing to create or
update their business as usual policies
so just to set the context one things
that Cherryleaf does is it writes and it
updates policies and procedures for
organizations and sometimes these
policies and procedures are relating to
business as usual and disaster recovery
type activities so what we thought would
be useful would be to share some of the
advice on the actions that organizations
should consider if they find them in a
situation where they need to write and
update their policies and procedures so
that they run their business their
organization effectively during this
time of where for example they might
have people working from home rather
than working as they would normally in
an office and this is going to be about
the process of writing and communication
rather than telling you specifically
what your for example cybersecurity
policy or what you’re writing from home
policy should be now we do have a
podcast recorded on a leadership
communication and we’ll be publishing
that in a few weeks time so like with
all projects you need to have a plan so
the most simplest and obvious thing to
do is to create a list of the documents
that you need to have to ensure that
people know what to do to keep your
business going so that will come
probably from management or the board
but it also can be useful to
ask your staff as well what information
that they need if they’re working from
home or if they’re working in an unusual
situation – what then normally used – so
you create a list of the documents that
you need and you create a list of the
documents that you have and from that
you can identify the gaps between the
two the documents that need to be
written and you can also go through a
process of prioritizing which ones need
to be written and updated and you can
create a spreadsheet and have a red
amber green set of colours to prioritize
the most important documents or ranking
from 1 to 4 or 1 to 6 and again
prioritize the ones that are the most
important ones to get done so you may
find that you also have documents that
exist but are out of date or need to be
improved so having created your list of
the documents that you need you need to
check on the condition of the ones that
already exist so the next step that we’d
recommend is that you create an audit
spreadsheet and if you contact info
at Cherryleaf.com we can send you a very
basic spreadsheet that you can use to
base this on and so what this
spreadsheet can do is it can identify
and contain the list of the documents
for those that exist already it can
identify where they are you can put the
location of that document and you can
also put other sort of metadata
information on there like who is
responsible for the content that is the
policy owner when it was last updated
and reviewed and information about the
condition of it so how do we assess the
condition and quality of a document to
judge whether it needs to be updated or
not well we can use some of the measures
that we use when people do website
content strategy and different criteria
by which they can assess the information
so I shall go through some of the ways
in which you can identify whether a
document needs to be improved on
I’ll go through the list and then we’ll
look at some of these to understand what
they mean so they are is it desirable is
it legally okay is it manageable/governable is it useful is it
relevant is it clear is it credible is
the content findable is it accurate is
it complete as a concise and is it
accessible so let’s explain what some of
those mean is it desirable this means is
there a business reason for publishing
it is it manageable and governable by
that we mean does it contain information
on who wrote it who approved it date of
the publication the version number and
so on useful is can it be used to
achieve its purpose so if it’s a set of
tasks to do something or for somebody to
be able to make a decision
does it give them the information or the
instructions they need to be able to do
that the relevance we’re talking about
is it relevant to the users situation
and needs so for example is it relevant
to them working at home or working at a
branch rather than the head office or to
their job role and is it clear does it
contain any ambiguity anything that’s
obscure can people understand what
they’re meant to be doing and findable
is the information organized in a
consistent way that lets users find the
information they’re looking for quickly
and easily and accurate are there any
mistakes or errors is it truthful as if
factual and complete does it have all
the information that somebody needs and
to an extent you could include in that
is it up-to-date and concise is it at
the right level of detail does it
contain information it’s just not needed
and in terms of accessible you might
have people in addition to those that
have sight impairments or other types of
physical impairments people that are
needing to use this information on a
mobile device or a screen reader or they
got their laptop plugged into their
television and using that as a second
screen is information viewable for those
situations so what documents do you need
to create for this type of situation I
can give you some suggestions some
indications that types of things that
you might need to consider so for
finance when the main issues with a
company in an emergency situation is
keeping staff paid and cash flow so you
might need policies and procedures in
place that are accurate and up to date
relating to payroll invoicing and credit
control for IT particularly people are
working remotely then there can be a lot
of different policies and procedures and
run books in the like that need to be in
place so there’s quite a long list for
that so let me give you a list of the
types of things that you need to
consider so you might need policies and
procedures on your cybersecurity your
system architecture how software is
configured and deployed your support
procedures your administration and
maintenance activities restart
procedures event management licensing
user access and user profile management
procedures and within that the critical
ones of adding and removing users and
you could also have information around
issuing laptops and acceptable use if
people are away from the office diagnostics and troubleshooting
procedures
backup and recovery failover planning
request fulfilment problem management
access management testing service
acceptance criteria project control
locks released in deployment management
so this level management capacity
management skills matrix supplier
contracts and service reporting in
governance and if you contact us we can
email you a list of first
topics and from an HR perspective you
may need to check that your information
is correct relating to you’re working at
home policy sickness policy working
hours and roles and responsibilities in
terms of who should do what if somebody
is off work and you might also need
content around risk management and again
resource management so you have your
list of the documents that you want
you’ve got a list of the documents that
need to be updated and prioritized then
the next stage is really to look for
commonalities see if there are common
document types so that you can establish
skeleton documents and regular standard
headings so that you have consistency
across the different types of documents
so you might find that there is a
consistent approach that you can
establish for policies process documents
or procedures for each of these document
types you can identify or so the
audience that might be using particular
different types of documents the purpose
of the documents and also common
metadata that you might want to include
with those particular documents
information about the information aren’t
being metadata so at that point you have
your list of the documents that you want
to create an approach of what you want
to include in each document and perhaps
the order in which the information is
going to flow then there’s the issue of
identifying and authoring platform now
in this type of situation time is
limited so it’s probably not practical
to move away from the tools that you
already have so let’s talk about what
you may be using today so one popular
tool is Google Docs it’s free it’s
familiar to many people within
organizations that use it and that can
be a good tool to use what you can do
within Google Docs is you can embed
other content such as spreadsheets and
no chance from other applications and
there are a couple of add-ons that you
can get that can help you with that side
of things to help you do flowchart study
describe from beginning to end the key
steps in a process the what to do and
there are tools like Draw.IO and
Lucidchart that you can add as
extensions to the Google suite to do
that type of thing and with Google Docs
built into that you can roll back to
look at the history of a document who
wrote what you can track who’s been
adding content and you can have the
ability for people to write comments
asking for clarification on certain
parts of the document and you’ve
downside with having content stored in
Google Documents is that it can be hard
to find particular documents so you
might want to have a document that
provides links I baked if you like a
table of contents or an index to help
people find the different documents that
are there and the same is true for
people that use Word and specifically
the online version of word that can come
with Office 365
again you have document history and the
ability to add comments again it’s
familiar and with Word documents again
you can have some basic document
metadata and if it’s stored on
SharePoint you can set up some rules
within SharePoint to flag up to certain
people to approve or review the content
at certain dates again there are some
issues because a document approach to
writing content it can be hard for
people to navigate and find information
now in terms of extensions and add-ons
that’s also possible within the Office
365 environment there is another tool
that you might want to consider which is
a desktop application called doc-to-help
what doc-to-help can do is
it can combine Word documents together
and generate HTML versions and
mobile-friendly versions of the content
it can create tables of contents that
provide navigation links to a collection
of different Word documents and they can
also add things like breadcrumbs and
indexes and if you need to localize the
content to different languages it can
integrate quite well with one of the
localization tools that is available now
you might have a technical writer or
technical author who works in your
organization they will have access to
more sophisticated tools and for example
they might be using tools like fair or
Robohelp and what those tools can do is
they can import again a collection of
different Word documents and break them
up into small chunks of contents to
appear as web pages you can have content
that can pop up you can have hot spotted
diagrams to navigate around to more
detailed information and again they can
integrate with localization tools within
the context of a dealing with a crisis
you probably don’t have time yourself to
familiarize yourself with that
particular tool but if you do have
somebody in your organization such as a
technical author who’s using that tool
today then you could call on their
expertise to make the content more
accessible and easier to use by using
that particular tool the other option to
Google Docs and to word is to use a wiki
and wikis can be easy to use in terms
of writing the content and they can
create the content in a way that’s
optimized for online viewing and you can
break the content into small topics or
small web pages and you can navigate
directly to a particular section rather
than to the front of a particular
document so one of the popular wiki
tools or wiki like tools is confluence
and that does have again add-ons for
doing flowcharts and that is a popular
tool within Microsoft teams which you
may get bundled with Office 365 there is
a very basic
Wiki I’m sorry one that in general we
will recommend but it does have the
advantage that you can use it within the
context of teams so you can have teams
chats and you can link to Word documents
within a particular team to chance as
well as the wiki so that might be worth
considering and Git and Github or Github
in particular has a wiki that you can
use again fairly straightforward to use
available and accessible over the web
can be sent if you are on the paid plan
for get up to be private and you can
have again document history who wrote
particular sections collaborative
authoring although it’s not necessarily
great if you’ve got hyperlinks and they
go into the wrong place and it can be
quite easy to have broken hyperlinks
within that particular tool but that’s
another consideration you don’t need to
know the normal branching and
forking capabilities of Github is just a
straightforward wiki the attraction of a
wiki is that the content is online it’s
designed to be viewable as web pages and
it can be easy for teams and of people
to write content in addition to those
tools ones that you might want to
consider are some tools for creating
screenshots or doing little videos that
show people the stages on how to use an
application and tools that we like on
that are Snagit and Camtasia and in fact
the makers of Snagit have announced that
they will provide free to organizations
up until the end of June they snake it
down
so we’ve mentioned a couple of flow
charting software applications you could
also use business process modelling
that’s something that we talked about in
episode 30 of the Cherryleaf podcast with
Terry Hooper and there are different BPM
business process modelling applications
that are available some that are free of
charge so you’ve identified the
documents that you need to create Eve
identified
some standard document types and ways to
organize and structure the information
you’ve identified an authoring platform
for writing the content there are a
couple of other steps that you also need
to consider as well
one is pushing roles responsibilities so
you’ll need to identify he’ll be writing
the content you may need to also
identify the policy owners for each
document who’s responsible for saying
yes this is the correct policy or not
the personal rights may not necessarily
be the person that approves publication
particularly if you want there to be a
gateway that the policy owner signs off
any content before it goes live so you
might have a publication approver and
you might also need a governance team
just to check that all the different
people creating content are doing it in
the same way to the quality that you
want so in the publishing approval
process you might have some checklists
that you create for the writers and
reviewers to take off that the content
is ready to go live and again that can
be the same checklist of quality checks
that we had when we were doing our audit
of the content for example you know is
it desirable is it legally okay is it
useful and so on and I mentioned
governments and maintenance and having a
process for that it may be sensible to
set up a review process to have a team
that creates these document quality
checklists perhaps even if you’ve got
time to establish a voice in tone or a
standards guide for the writers and to
establish things like version control
and change control processes now if you
had time and in an ideal world you might
want to consider moving away from a
document approach to more of a service
delivery approach to content more
focused on the tasks that people want
rather than explaining as they were from
a top-down audit perspective with
different Navigation routes for
different audiences those audiences
being staff managers and auditors for
example but in this context at this
moment you may not have time to do
and another thing in an ideal world that
would be good to do would be to train
staff the types of things that you might
want to cover if you do want to take
on training if you have the time is
things like how to write clearly how to
use the standard documents that you’ve
created how to document the changes that
have been made and how to think about
the users and writing for their
particular needs how much detail to
include how to structure and sequence
information and to explain the approval
process and review process that you have
in place if you’re sticking to the tools
that you already have today then you may
not need to go into too much detail
about the authoring tool apart from
maybe some tips on how to use the tool
correctly for example using styles
within tools like Microsoft Word of
course you need to identify who’s going
to write the content again this is
something that we do normal situation do
bear in mind that you might have people
such as in-house technical those are
technical writers or courseware
developers who have skills available for
writing this content and there’s always
the option of pulling them off what
they’re doing today to update the
policies and procedures or help people
through that process so an unplanned
unscheduled episode really just to give
some advice a list of actions to
consider
I hope it’s useful I hope everyone stays
as well as they can be if you have any
questions relating to this then do
contact us info at Cherryleaf.com if
you’d like that spreadsheet then contact
us for that in terms of auditing your
existing content and again the list of
the types of documents you might want to
create we can send a list over
– for that otherwise thanks for
listening
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