Why You Need a Policy Management System

Why do we bother documenting processes, tasks, and events? What purpose does documentation serve? And, if we’re going to do it, shouldn’t we do it right?

For years, Bizmanualz has offered policy and procedure manuals covering most of the business essentials — accounting, human resources, IT, and so on. We’ve done all the research, writing and organizing and provided you with valuable content.

And we delivered this information in Microsoft Word format, used by more organizations than any other kind of document processing software. But what we cannot do is ensure that, once you reshape Bizmanualz policies and procedures into your own, your employees will utilize them or that the procedures will be updated as needed.

Once you’re done with your policies-and-procedures project, you’ve added to the number of documents you have to maintain. How do you maintain your existing documents? How do you ensure that they’re accurate and up-to-date? How do you make sure that the proper version is in use? For that matter, how do you ensure that they’re being used at all?

Why do we need documents, anyway? They just take up a lot of space, right? Actually, there are many good reasons why we have them. We have documents because we need to:

• Communicate ideas, concepts, requirements, etc., to our coworkers, managers, and subordinates;
• Be aware of and understand our responsibilities;
• Ensure consistency and repeatability in our processes;
• Give assurance that we’re accountable for our actions (i.e., we can show proof of what we’ve done);
• Have information on which we can base our plans for the near and long term; and
• Meet various requirements (customers, regulations, standards, etc.).

But, while we need to document policies for all these reasons, many things that should be documented aren’t simply because (a) the act of documenting is so time consuming and (b) the ongoing task of keeping documents and records organized takes even more time. When you think about it, couldn’t you really use a document and record librarian? Someone to maintain consistency, order, security, and availability of your company documents?

But who can afford to keep a documents/records librarian on staff? Well, that’s where a policies and procedures based document management system (DMS) — like the one in development at Bizmanualz — comes in. A policies and procedures DMS is a way of managing your policy deployment documents (internal and external), keeping them organized, letting you control access to them, enabling a better development and review process, logging activity, and allowing automatic record and document management.

In short, a policy management system makes your  policies and procedures documents more useful — it adds value.

Now, I have to ask…are you using a policy management system of some kind? Regardless of how long you’ve been using it, what do you think of it? We certainly didn’t cover everything here — what do you want to add?

Thanks for your insights.

Related posts:

1. Policy Procedures Management Software Requirements