Checklists for effective content and records projects -- Chime in!

Greetings from the Nation's Snowbelt. About 40-45 inches on the ground.

I put together this rough list of lists for a lecture I did for some college students.

What's missing? What's redundant? Chime in via comments -- I'd love to hear your thoughts.

8 Factors to Consider in Creating an Information Management Strategy

1. Don't underestimate the importance of your platform choices: The choices you make have a long tail.
2. A good starting point: Focus on paper.
3. Collaboration without structure is a waste of time.
4. The need for control is not going away.
5. In a tight economy, nothing flies unless it can deliver process efficiency and automation.
6. In making choices, think knowledge workers, not document specialists.
7. You need a plan.
8. Failure to address change management can make everything else moot.

Platform selection checklist

• What business objectives are you really trying to accomplish (both short and long term)? How will you measure them?
• How does your organization value the various types of ECM functionality?
• How well does your platform perform MOST important functions?
• How much is out of the box and how much is through custom integration?
• What IT competencies exist in your organization?
• What needs to integrate with what?
• Are you willing to consider open source and SaaS solutions?
• How comfortable are you with reliance on a particular vendor "stack?”

Scanning and capture checklist

• What types of documents do you need to scan?
• How many documents do you need to scan?
• Do you need color? B&W? Grayscale? How much resolution? Both have storage implications
• Are you doing backfile conversion (how far?) or day forward?
• What are you going to do with the paper when you’re done?
• How much scanning (or which parts) do you really want to do yourself?
• Are you trying to create an archive or drive a process? Or both?
• Have you thought through the training issues for distributed capture?

Collaboration checklist

• Create a policy document that defines how your organization will approach networking/collaboration.
• Cover both inside and outside the firewall.
• Define roles and responsibilities in business and HR terms, not technology.
• Be minimalist – don’t try to cover every single situation.
• Define retention requirements. What do you want to save? What MUST you save?
• Train people as to what is expected and in what situation.
• Integrate tools into everyday workflow. Don’t just bolt this on.
• Encourage spread of collaborative tools organically, not by mandates.

Risk management checklist

• Is all critical information being captured?
• Are the right disaster and data recovery processes in place?
• Can you locate and produce records and prove they are unaltered?
• Do you have a strategy for metadata?
• Can you control who can access what?
• Is there redundancy in your system?
• Can you easily find information?
• Have you considered ALL aspects of long-term preservation? – People, hardware, software

Process improvement checklist

•  Start with something important, but manageable. Document-intensive processes are everywhere.
•  Identify the BUSINESS problem you are trying to solve.
•  Identify and engage the BUSINESS stakeholders.
•  Don’t simply try to automate a poor process -- a bad idea.
•  Document the current process and verify.
•  Define the new document-enabled process and verify.
•  Market your successes. Document your benefits.
•  Be iterative. Don’t try to solve everything all at once.

Knowledge worker productivity checklist

• Can your people organize and share information in ways that help them work smarter and faster?
• Is it easy to find whomever or whatever is needed to work smarter and faster?
• Is the right information available, in the right way, in the right amount?
• Is corporate-built stuff (like IT, training, and support) easy to use?
• Does the corporate-built stuff provide what is needed, as fast as it is needed?
• Are staff resources used wisely and effectively?
• Is the system separate from or integrated with “normal” work?
• Only control what MUST be controlled.

Planning checklist

• Have you built a business strategy and blueprint?
• Has the strategy been embraced by senior management?
• Has the blueprint (including both capital and people requirements) been embraced by senior management?
• Have you assessed your current technology state and built a roadmap for the future?
• Have you created a governance structure and approach?
• Have you defined a specific initial project and built a plan?
• Assuming initial success, how will you communicate and build upon that success?
• Do you have a change management plan?

Change management checklist

• Do you have top level support?
• Are you planning to start small and build?
• Do you have an internal PR and communication plan?
• Have you created user personas?
• Are you focused on technology or process?
• Have you systematically involved users and business owners?
• Are you using the tools themselves (i.e., collaboration) to overcome resistance?
• Do you have a training plan – and also a plan for what happens after the formal training is done?

What's missing? What's redundant? Chime in via comments -- I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Comments

[Gordy Hoke]

John, your emphasis on change management can not be overemphasized. Trying to enhance content and records management requires enlisting all of the stakeholders, and that is tough. We need to speak techie to the IT Director, money to the finance people, legalese to Counsel, etc. Most people understand needs best when the needs are expressed in their native language. As change agents, we need to be polylingual.

[Maria Chrysafidi]

But why only referring to SharePoint?? There are a lot of ECM suites and I am so interested to hear your opinion about a wider range of solutions, if not for RM itself as a principle.

[Joe Shepley]

John,

Great post (as usual)!

I might expand this one a bit, "In a tight economy, nothing flies unless it can deliver process efficiency and automation," to go beyond just generating savings to include generating revenue. There are a number of critical business areas where ECM can contribute to positive cash flow at an organization (like customer communication management or product development), which all help tip the scales in the favor of an ECM initiative no matter the financial weather.

Regardless of the economic climate, however, you gotta show business value, and savings or revenue are the two big guns in that area.

Thanks again for all the great info on the blog!

[John Mancini]

You are so right about change mgt.

And for those of you who don't know Gordie, you should -- knows tons about the REALITY of ECM and ERM implementation.

[John Mancini]

You're right -- just one of a lot of solutions out there.