Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello. Thank you for joining us. Welcome to what Counts, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of information governance. Here we highlight proven solutions developed through our experience working with companies across various industries, and we talk about how you can apply these solutions to your company.
Whether you're interested in information governance, have a need, or just curious to hear about information management challenges like email management, retention management, or asset data management, this podcast is for you. This is Lee, and in this episode, Mora and I will talk about a few practical steps leaders can take right now to get a clearer picture of their actual organizational maturity.
So, Mora, this was.
[00:00:45] Speaker B: You're just looking at me like, go for it.
[00:00:47] Speaker A: This was. This is one thing that we were going to cover in our last episode, but decided to make a separate episode in itself.
So hopefully we have enough to talk about when it comes to this.
[00:01:00] Speaker B: I think we have plenty to talk about.
So before we dive into some deep, some specific ideas, I think what we're getting at here is that process is about people, and process can be supported by good systems, but it is about people.
If you ever looked at. In my high school, we had this big square of grass in the back, sort of in the middle of three buildings, and you were supposed to walk around, you weren't supposed to walk on the grass. It was a strict school. We had a lot of rules, and that was one of them.
[00:01:43] Speaker A: Not at your high school, but I almost got busted walking across, and I was going to have to come every weekend to cut the grass anyway.
[00:01:51] Speaker B: That would be a different punishment. I don't recall there being a punishment except for the French teacher yelling at us in French and telling us to go back.
But what you could very clearly see, especially in winter, is that the path that everybody cut across, which went straight diagonally across the square, had no grass on, was worn down. It was just a dirt path right through the middle of the square. Because when the French teacher wasn't out there and happened to notice us, we all went that way.
So actually I didn't, because I was always a very good girl in high school and did not go across the grass, but a lot of people did.
So that takes us to. One of the things is people are going to find a way to get work done. They're going to find a way that is the easiest way to get from here to there.
[00:02:47] Speaker A: Straightest thing between a point A and point B is a straight line.
[00:02:51] Speaker B: Straight. A straight, straight line is the easiest path.
And if they're not doing it that way, if they're not going in A straight line. If they're not following the process that's been laid out, then the problem is in the process, people are not looking to make things hard.
And generally people are not looking to hide what they're doing.
People are trying to get their job done. And like we said in the last episode, most people feel a real sense of this is my job and I'm supposed to do it well and feel some pride, some satisfaction in getting work done, getting it done well. So if they're not following a process, it's because the process is broken. So I think that's a place that I always want to start, is to understand what's the reason for it.
So what do you think about that?
[00:03:45] Speaker A: I mean, that's a great place to start, but maybe there's a misinterpretation between what's written down and the process.
[00:03:54] Speaker B: Maybe it's just like what, you have an example.
[00:03:56] Speaker A: No, not off the top of my head, but just.
You think it's this because this is what you're doing, this is what everybody's doing. And you try to write it down and you try to explain it, and it just doesn't come out right.
Believe me, I. I could tell you that.
[00:04:15] Speaker B: Well, tell me.
[00:04:16] Speaker A: Because it's not coming out correctly.
[00:04:19] Speaker B: Not coming out. That's true. That's a good point.
So I think it's something along the lines of, well, this is a challenge. It's a challenge. Okay. So we start with the. The underlying assumption that people are trying to do the right thing. That's where I. That was what I was trying to say. We start there, then we look at what are the steps they're supposed to follow, and are those steps clear? I think is a good question.
So I was reading something the other day. It was a client sample that they'd given me, and it said it was a training. And it said, call the person, ask the question, don't promise too much.
Call them again, ask the question again, don't promise too much.
Call the person, ask the person a question, don't promise too much. Three times it said that in the course of this training.
And so it didn't say what the question was, and it didn't say what not to promise.
That was kind of assumed in the course of this training. Well, if you took that training and somebody's in the room talking to you, probably at the moment you're taking the training, you know what example you're talking about.
But suppose you came to the company two months after this training was given, and Somebody said well how am I supposed to get this done? And you just handed them the training without going through it with them. Just hand it to them. So then they get to page three and it says call the contact.
And it doesn't say all the things you're supposed to ask the contact or what are you supposed to tell them, it just says call them.
So then they've got a document that supposedly is the official process and it's got a big hole in it.
Or I'm thinking about the time that I was training a whole company, huge company on and I've done this a couple times how to clean out an old email box.
In one case it's because the small company was spinning off of a large company and they couldn't take all their email with them. They were supposed to judge did this email belong to the new company or the old company.
And we did in person trainings for a thousand people telling them how to decide if the email belonged to the new company or the old company.
And so all those people had to go through all their email boxes. Then I used that same training as a starting point for when I was helping a company stop keeping all their email forever. They were going to, they were rolling out a new time based retention policy for email and they had to decide where to put the emails that they wanted to save. They were allowed to save them if they took them out of the active email system and put them somewhere else.
So in the first case the training was about ownership.
Was this email related to business that was moving with the spin off company or. And the second one it was what kind of a record is it turns out what kind of a record is it is a lot harder training and it's harder to do it in, in a time frame around email retention roll off because it relates to the larger business.
In both cases, but especially in the second one, we created workbooks and FAQs and there was even a system that helped inventory that legacy email to help them figure out what it was supposed to be and whether they wanted to keep it or not.
But once we got through the thousand person training, the in person, in this case it was mostly remote training but it was live and people could ask questions.
Once we got through that, as new people came onto, came into the company and came on to the email roll off, they needed training in how to, how to make those same decisions.
But it didn't fit there. It didn't fit the urgency of the situation that we had in the beginning.
So it was, it was the Wrong kind of training. We had to update it, we had to make changes because people didn't understand that their email was going to go away in six months or most people ended up putting it in the archive where it could live for three years, thinking they'd get back to it someday.
And we could see that. And that's the other thing I think is don't just review what's written down, but review what's happening.
[00:09:18] Speaker A: So I think you're right, because if you.
Well, let's put it this way. If you try to document every nuance, you'll drive yourself crazy. If you roll it up to a high level, leaves room for interpretation now.
Right. So what's the balance?
How do you complement the documentation with the training to get the right answer or to get the right kind of movement forward?
That's the key piece.
[00:09:53] Speaker B: Yes.
And so I have.
I think we're looking at a combination of things for answers.
And one is principles versus steps.
Right. So the principles behind information governance, I think they're clear, but perhaps that's because I'm an information governance person.
But the idea that you should keep the information that supports the job that has to get done, so you keep the information that you use as an input and you keep the information that you. That you produce out of a process because it may be an input into another process or something.
So those principles are pretty clear.
But if you start to get into, well, this copy or that copy needs to go to this person or that person, then you lose. Then you can't cover all the possible tracks. Right.
So then where you get. So then where I think modern technology can help is workflow.
Workflow that's well thought out and that.
And analyzed. So you've spent the time doing the analysis and you know what triggers, what should trigger each step moving forward, and you know what roles the actors play as opposed to what people are in the roles so the system can enforce.
[00:11:13] Speaker A: So take people out of the equation.
[00:11:16] Speaker B: No, no, no. But the people are in the roles. That's a separate management process.
But if, if Lee's on vacation, then Maura has to handle things. But if you. So I'm thinking about when we had to get our insurance provider to do something for us and, and how I didn't know how to do it, but had to get done in a bigger company. It could be that you have somebody who always approves the purchase of something. They have to approve a purchase over $10,000, say, and you just always go to your manager for that approval. But in Fact, actually, this is a real example invoice approvals.
And in a large company, you might have a contract and it has monthly invoices against it. Say it's a document storage contract and the person who is responsible for the process of sending documents to off site storage should be able to approve the invoices because that person knows what's been sent to offsite storage. They know how much went in, how much is being stored, and what kind of transactions or activity happened during the month, what got pulled back, what got sent, sent back again, what new stuff went in, or what things were permanently withdrawn.
But a change in policy from this invoice is under the delegated authority of that person to approve to. Oh no, we're looking at the whole contract value and that's over. The person's delegated authority to approve can cause a problem. So the contract gets approved appropriately at the level above the old invoice approver, because contract approval goes through a different workflow and gets signed by someone with the appropriate authority. But then every invoice comes in and the new rule tries to send every invoice up to, say, the general counsel or the head of it, the cio, because the off site storage contract happens to sit in their department. They didn't mind signing the contract because yes, they were committing the company to pay all this money over the course of a year, but they don't want to sign the invoices every month.
And so they don't, they just don't get to it. And then the invoices don't get paid and then there's fees. And it's because the process changed based on a policy change that didn't, that didn't really understand how the work happened.
So you need a workflow that actually reflects the reality of things, which is, okay, there's a control around total contract value because that's what the firm is committing to. And that control requires a higher level of authority, but within the approved contract value, you don't need that same level of control to pay against those things.
So that was a real example for a client storage contract.
But it could be true for any contract who is authorized, who is overseeing the actual work month on a monthly basis, and therefore should be authorized to approve the invoices as long as they are within the budget. And that person also is accountable or should be accountable, and this would be outside the finance system, but accountable to demonstrate that the contract is accomplishing what it's supposed to accomplish.
So if it's not a storage contract, But a construction contract, that same person who's approving invoices within the budget also should be demonstrated. Must there should be a way to hold that person accountable for yes, we are accomplishing the milestones that have been agreed and the building is still on time to be constructed. And if you have to demonstrate that before you approve the invoice, then that's, then that's a meaningful control as opposed to sending an invoice up to somebody three levels up who doesn't have any idea if the work is getting done.
So thinking about the way that the workflow reflects the work, I think is really important.
I think the biggest thing with that is this is not a one and done thing. Processes don't stay the same.
And controls around spend. There's often more controls around spend than in any other place in a company, but they're not always aligned really to the accomplishment of what work.
So it works.
I feel like I went all over the place there, but that's a really a reflection of how tangled up this can be.
People are working hard every day to get stuff done and if they are working around the system, it's because the system isn't set up properly.
And the disconnect between. We talked last time about the disconnect between goal setting and work required. There's also sometimes a disconnect between policy setting and the way a process is set up.
[00:16:49] Speaker A: So if you see something, say something, the only way it's going to get fixed.
[00:16:56] Speaker B: Yes, but there has. There should be. If you want to. If you're taking this on and our listeners, we're putting this out for you in case you're taking this on is the proactive approach to finding the problems and figuring out what's happening and symptoms. Like the invoice hasn't been paid in four months because it's piled up in the GC's inbox and he doesn't have time for it and looks at it late at night and is like, oh, I need to ask so and so did this actually happen? And then the next day gets all caught up in something else and forgets to ask.
So those are, you might say those are patterns you see start to see those patterns in workarounds because workflows and process aren't working.
Okay, perfect. I felt for a second like I had a third episode in me that was coming out of this, but I forgot what it is. Maybe we'll remember next time.
[00:17:57] Speaker A: That's good. Save it. If you have any questions, please send us an email at info trailblazer.us.com or look us up on the web at www.trailblazer.us.com or check out our learning academy at Trailblazer learningacademy.com Thank you for listening and please tune in to our next episode. Also, if you like this episode, please be a champion. Share it with people in your social media network or like this episode or subscribe to our our podcast. That would be great. As always, we appreciate you the listeners. Special thanks goes to Jason Blake Create our music.
[00:18:34] Speaker B: Thanks everyone.
