Assessment Questions - E68

[00:00:00] Lee: Hello [00:00:00] Lee: This is Lee. It's always good to take a pause once in a while and look back at some of the podcast episodes that really stood out. One such episode came out when we first started our podcast way back in June of 2021. It's the episode called Developing Information and Data Management Assessment Questions. Turns out that this episode can really turn things around for organizations who know they have information or data management problems, because they can't find a document they need or actually don't realize that people downstream from them are having difficulty interpreting the data supplied for a report they need to create, but don't quite know how to get to the root cause of the issue. Once you determine that you want to find out how information is flowing across your organization, this episode is the one to take notes on. So let's take another listen to Developing Information and Data Management Assessment Questions. [00:00:54] Lee: Hello. Thank you for joining us. This is What Counts by TrailBlazer Consulting. In this podcast, we share our experience working with companies to solve their information management challenges. We tackle records retention schedules, program implementation and training, and more complex challenges like asset data management. This is Lee, and in this episode, we'll discuss how to best structure assessment questions to get the best response from the people you interview. [00:01:22] Maura: Thanks, Lee. Hi, I'm Maura, and I'm happy to talk about assessment questions. Today might not sound like an exciting part of the project, but actually it sets a foundation for the next phases. So for those of you who listened to some of our earlier sessions, but even if you haven't, we usually start by identifying an overall goal for the information management program. What's the problem we're trying to solve. We distill that down into a problem statement. Having done that, we then start looking at who are we going to interview. How do we structure this assessment process? Is an assessment the right next step? It often is the right first step to go out and talk to more people. Because, if you're a consultant coming in and you've been brought in by somebody in legal or somebody in IT, or if you're inside an organization and you're in legal or IT or in a part of the business, you can't see everything from wherever you start. You haven't seen the whole picture. So we find that the best way to learn more is to talk to people. And while it's fun to just talk to people randomly and get them to just tell us whatever they want to talk about today, maybe their canoeing trip over the weekend, I learned a lot about pontoon boats in one of my projects. What we really want to know is how are you using information. How is it being created? How is it being shared across the organization, and how is it helping you to do your job? [00:02:57] Lee: The side discussions are to create the connection between the interviewer and the interviewee. So, it does help to learn about pontoons or anything else that you learn about. [00:03:10] Maura: It does. And you never know when some good pontoon information might be useful in another setting. So what questions do you ask? And when we first started doing this type of work many years ago, the first question you might want to ask, you might think you're going to ask is tell me about your records. And the first time I tried to do that was in a government setting. It was Environmental Protection Agency office. And most of the people that I talked to said, we don't have any records. And that didn't seem like the right answer because why had they hired us to help them figure out their records management problems if nobody had any records? So, the more we got into the conversations, the more we realized people don't think about records. That's not what they think about every day. So we evolved into tell us about your job. How do you do your job? What information do you need to do your job? And in fact, when we first started these interviews, I was in graduate school. I went to graduate school for library science and although I've never worked in a library, I have found the thinking, the process and the skills coming out of the world of library science to be invaluable to information management. One of the things that I did in library school was I wrote a thesis on how you design a library around the needs of the users. I was focused on business users. In my job as an information management consultant, I continue to focus on business users, but instead of talking about reference material, most of the time we focus on the business records, the records that you use to run your business. So back to the questions. We start the conversation with a person by saying, tell me about your job. Now, when we ask that question, it's not the blind kind of wide eyed question that it sounds like because remember, we've done some work beforehand. We have talked with our contact. We've identified who we're going to interview, how do we put together that list and we have a cross section of people that we've identified from different parts of the organization. All of that feeds back into that problem statement. Do we need to talk to everybody in the organization this time or do we just want to talk about one division or one functional area? Once we've figured that out, we have the list. We know who these people are. We know where they sit organizationally. We know what their job responsibilities are and we have a sense of what type of information they're probably dealing with on a daily basis. What are they getting in, what are they reviewing, what are they creating, and what are they sending out? But we go into the conversation and ask them, tell us about your job. Tell us what you're responsible for. Tell us what causes you the most trouble. We do this in a conversational style. We have an interview guide. It's a standard template. Before we enter into the first interview, we will review that with the client. We'll tailor some of the questions. So, in some cases, we're going to talk about asset data. This is if we're talking to an infrastructure organization, we're going to ask them about the physical assets that they own and how they're operated, how they're maintained, how the commercial part of their business intersects with these physical assets. Do they have projects that are tied to each asset? Do they have contracts that are tied to each assets? Do they have customers that are tied to each asset? We tailor our interview guide to reflect that bent for an infrastructure organization, as opposed to, say, a medical organization where we might be asking them about privacy data and clinical trial records and regulatory requirements that they have to comply with. We'll tailor the interview guide that way. Either way, we've tailored the interview guide to match the industry, to match the company. There's a structure to our interview guide that is consistent every time. The first step is, tell us about your job. Tell us what's easy, what's hard, what kind of information do you need, where does it come from? Are they getting information from outside the organization or from other parts of the company? How does it get to them? Does it come in email? Does it come in a system? Does it come in paper? Because that still happens. Then, what do they do with it? They read it. They do some analysis. They do some calculations. They enter it into a system. What do they do? We can then go either to the next step, which is what do they do next? Where do they send that information? Or we can take a deeper dive into the what do they do if they're using a system. What system is it? Now, again, based on the work we've done to set up this assessment, the person we're talking to as our contact and possibly other interviews that we've done before we've reached this person, we may know many of the systems that exist in the company, and we may have an idea that they have an SAP or an Oracle as their finance system. They have some contract management system. They have a maintenance management system. We may know that, but we still get surprised and find out that, oh, they have a compliance tracking system for ethics and compliance cases that nobody has mentioned in the first ten interviews. So, the conversation about, do they use a system, what do they do with that system? Are they doing data entry? Are they just looking at reports? Are they comparing data that they've received to what's in the system? What are they doing? And then we ask them, where do they put their data? Are they storing things on a SharePoint site, in a content management system, in a file share? Are they storing things in email, just leave it in their email box? Are they keeping it on their hard drive? Are they putting it in some third party storage location like Box or Dropbox, which is really hard to get a handle on. It's good to know when people are using Box or Dropbox. We ask those questions and we have this conversation with them that's all about them and how they're interacting with information and what are they responsible for and what are they worried about. Then kind of on the exiting side of it is where does it go from here? How do you share this information? Do you go back to some external person or do you go to someone else in your company? Who takes the next step? Do they need the information that you've been working with? Do they need the pieces that you've added? Is somebody else going to try and look at that? When we started this and people were very paper intensive, we would always ask, can you find things in the office of the person next door if they're out? And if you were out, could someone else on your team find what they need in your office? The answer was almost always no to both of those questions. Not 100%, but almost always. I thought that we were past that, that we didn't have to ask about paper anymore. But recently finished an assessment of a large company and the pandemic and the shutdowns took them by surprise because they were doing a lot of processing by paper. They were literally writing things down and carrying them to the guy next door to do the next step. And in the first couple of weeks when we started this assessment, which was April of 2020, people were printing things out in their houses and keeping a pile in the living room, getting ready to bring it back to the office. The assessment for this company took about two and a half months. We did about 85 interviews altogether, and that two and a half months is pretty long for an assessment. That was definitely an impact of being remote. 85 people was also a lot to interview. That one grew quite a bit, but it was interesting because in that two and a half month period, by the July time frame, when I finished the interviews, nobody was printing things out in their living room anymore. Nobody was planning that they had to take a big pile of paper back to the office. Unfortunately, their substitute was keep it in their email. So now we're working on managing their email in a different way. It was a very quick evolution to move out of that paper process into a different process and yet it hadn't happened in the previous 15 years when almost everyone else moved out of the paper world into the electronic world. So you never know what you're going to find. All right, so we take these questions, we tailor them for the industry. We might have a section that's about medical regulations. We might have a section that's about privacy data. We might have a section that's about asset data. That all depends on where you are and what type of company you're talking to. Depending on how old the company is, we will definitely ask about, do they send things to offsite storage? There is a sort of underlying connotation to the word, to the phrase records management that makes people think of dusty boxes in a warehouse and in a lot of companies still, there is an end game process where at the end of a whole thing, people print stuff out, put it in a box, and send it to offsite storage. They almost never pull it back. They almost never use it again, and they're depending on electronic copies of that information every day to do their job, but they've sent it to offsite storage. So we ask about that question, we ask about that dichotomy, and we use these interviews as an opportunity to start the education process, start the change management process, start people thinking about information in a different way. It's a very light touch. It's not a heavy handed lecture during the interview process. It's just, oh, did you think about this? So, oh, you're putting it in your email, and you're putting it on the file share, and you're sending it in a box to offsite storage. So you've kind of stored the same thing three times. We had one group many years ago that we discovered that they were storing the resumes of candidates that they interviewed, but didn't hire, in six places. So these resumes are interviews that ended up going nowhere. There is a requirement, the organization does have a requirement to keep those records for two years. One copy in HR to say, from an EEOC perspective, we interviewed these people, they were not qualified, or the person who was selected was qualified in this way, or whatever that process is that leads them to. We picked one out of seven, but they didn't need six copies of these resumes that had been sent to all the people who interviewed them and kept them in all these six places. When we spelled that out for them at the end of the assessment process, they were shocked. Wait, we're doing what? Why would we do that? Exactly. Why would you do that? And as people get more and more concerned about privacy data and the protection of privacy data, six stray copies of a resume floating around times, however many candidates have been interviewed and not hired, that's a risk that the company doesn't need to be taking. So we take these questions, we've tailored them, then we have the conversations and every conversation gives us more information to go into the next one. Sometimes we will circle back. If we've gone through a set of interviews and we've kind of formed a picture of one of the flows of information through the company, we've talked to somebody in accounting, we've talked to somebody in procurement, we've talked to somebody in the field and we see how purchase request becomes a purchase order becomes a goods receipt, becomes an invoice, a paid invoice and accounts payable. The third or fourth interview in, somebody brings up a shadow process that no one else has mentioned. We'll say, that's interesting. We didn't know that if you wanted to buy something and you didn't have time to go through the whole process, you could do a non PO invoice payment or a manual check, or you could put it on your corporate expense card. No one else has mentioned that. And so then we'll circle back and talk to the couple of people who were earlier in the process chain and say, oh, we heard about this. Can you tell us more about how that works? So it's a little bit of a flow with the questionnaire. The idea of organizing your questions beforehand is it gives you a chance to organize your thoughts about what do you expect to learn in the assessment, what do you really want to know and what will you do if you come across something unexpected? So spending that time up front gives you the chance to do that. We've also used interview guides to take sort of baseline data, trying to understand how is records management viewed across the organization. For instance, with one pharmaceutical company many years ago, we asked them three questions about the records management program. Were they aware that there was a records management policy? Were they aware that there was a records management program? And did they understand that what they should do with records when they were inactive? And we asked those three questions of everyone that we interviewed. And so we were able to look at some trends and discover that most people knew there was a records management policy and almost no one knew what they should do with their inactive records. It gives you some guidance for, okay, where do we need communication, where do we need training, and what else should we take a look at? That takes us to the end of developing the questionnaire. We want to talk in a later podcast, we will talk about the kind of companion to the questions, which is looking at documents, looking at policies, and we put together an information request that we collect those things. That's a topic for another day. Thank you. [00:18:13] Lee: Well, I did want to jump in though more because it sounds like you're collecting so much information just from asking prompting questions to get an individual to talk about their job. How long do these interviews take? My experience is shorter is better. Come back when you need it and my average is about a half hour. But what is your experience? [00:18:38] Maura: That's a great question, and I also think a half an hour is the right number. In some cases, where a company wants us to talk to three or four people at the same time, we'll stretch it to 45 minutes. It is unusual to go beyond that, not that it hasn't happened. When you get somebody who really wants to talk, then you can go an hour. But for the most part, we're under a half an hour in any of these interviews. So it sounds longer today because I'm talking about all the thinking that I'm doing while I'm having the conversation. [00:19:15] Maura: All right, well, that's a wrap on this episode of What Counts, and we appreciate your time. Thank you very much. [00:19:23] Lee: If you have any questions, please send us an email at [email protected] or look us up on the web at www.trailblazer.us.com. Thank you for listening, and please tune into our next episode. Also, if you like this episode, please be a champion and share it with people in your social media network. As always, we appreciate you, the listeners. Special thanks goes to Jason Blake, who created our intro music. [00:19:50] Maura: All right, thank you.