I love the ‘consulting’ part of consulting. What I mean by this is, the up front discovery and design phases of the project. Actually building and implementing the solution can be enjoyable at times too, but I definitely prefer the more consultative bits more. I love learning about how a customer currently does their process and seeing what ideas I can come up with to make it more efficient. A common theme that can be easily solved with the right technology and approach is that many companies have processes in which the users are not dealing with the right amount of information at the right time. Too often users are interacting with entire documents when they only really need to touch a small portion of it. At worst, there is no document management system and these documents are simply emailed from one person to another where versions and changes continually get lost. When many people have to contribute to the same document, one really needs a system that can at least lock and version the document. Better yet, the system can build compound documents from smaller documents or parts of documents that can be assigned to different individuals.
A system like that which can surface and then roll up just the needed information to and from the specific users brings with it many advantages. But the actual interface for capturing that information has to be optimized as well. In many cases allowing the user to simply write whatever they want in a Word doc or rich-text editor may be perfect. In more cases some sort of template in which they just fill in fields is more appropriate. But in many situations the kind of information that should be on that small part of the whole document is very structured in nature and much better served by filling out a simple web form with form controls like constrained-choice drop-downs and check-boxes presenting the user with predefined choices to predefined questions.
I once learned about a customer’s auditing process and it basically went like this:
- Auditor informs company they will be doing an audit at a certain date
- Auditor comes in and audits those areas
- Auditor issues a findings document indicating they have x number of issues they need to deal with
- Responder from company creates an ‘issues document’ from this and emails it around to all people that might have input on any of the issues
- Issues document gets edited by several users simultaneously and they all email them to the responder
- Each issue needs to be responded to in basically one of three ways
- “has been remediated” (referencing document number that shows this)
- “will be remediated” (and date of expected remediation plus any notes)
- “will remain non-compliant” (along with notes)
- Responder receives emails from users, repeatedly bugging them for responses as needed and creates response document
- Responder sends response document to Auditor
They were constantly losing information and repeating work due to this process.
It became obvious that what they should have been doing is creating and working with individual “issue” objects. I prototyped a solution for them on the Vignette (now Open Text) Collaboration platform that allowed them to create secure online audit workspaces for each audit. They were created by cloning a predefined templated workspace that had things like
- a common discussion thread around the audit
- a shared calendar with audit dates on it
- placeholders for the auditor’s findings document and the official response document (which had its own approval workflow)
- an issues folder that lets one create specific issues from the auditor’s findings document
The issue object was based on a folder (the platform lets you extend the base object types like folders, documents, and discussions ) so that it could contain important reference materials, be subscribed to, be emailed into, and all the other things one can do with a base folder type in the platform. But I also gave it the custom attributes that it needed like ‘Due date’, ‘Assigned To’ ,’Response’ (with choices like ‘Has been remediated, Will be remediated, etc.), ‘Notes’, ‘Reference #’, and ‘Expected Remediation Date’.
So someone would go through the auditor’s findings and then create an issue out of every issue on it. Each one would be assigned to the person that was best to answer it. That user would receive an email with a link to that online issue workspace that indicated its due date. The user would receive a preconfigured amount of email reminders until it was completed, as each issue object has a process defined around it. The response document was then automatically created by a display template that rolled up the information that each user responded to into one nicely-formatted text document.
One of the more advanced and important features of the Open Text platform which we used here is that the workspace templates allow one to pre-map access rights so that the content in the cloned workspace automatically has the correct permissions set on each of the cloned sub-folders and items.
With this solution in place the customer could respond much more quickly and accurately and with much less time spent by its valuable employees. Every audit has its own secure workspace with a full audit history of every response to every issue. This is also, I think, a perfect example of optimizing a collaborative business process.
