Many to Many Procedures

When we first developed the PolicyCo platform, we made the assumption that there should be one procedure for one article. We soon realized…

When we first developed the PolicyCo platform, we made the assumption that there should be one procedure for one article. We soon realized both through customer conversations and our own personal experience that this was not a very scalable architecture. Articles tend to be general while procedures are highly prescriptive.

Let’s take a look at how enterprises choose to back up various systems as an example. It’s possible for even small enterprises to have multiple databases each with its own teams and backup routines. Each team should be able to describe their unique processes for performing those backups. Team A may need to back up a RedShift cluster while Team B is backing up a MySQL database. The truly exciting part of our procedure management becomes apparent when you see how flexible it is and how it can help your entire organization work from the same playbook. Some procedures are relevant to the entire organization; things like dress code, time off, etc. Other procedures are specific to certain departments, for instance, it’s important that your Sales Team knows how to operate Hubspot while your Technical teams need to understand how to use Github. Procedures can be assigned to one or more departments and shared among those users or they can be assigned to the entire organization (everyone). We’ve taken procedures out of the tabbed interface and moved them to the left sidebar for editing. This sidebar approach means that anyone in your organization who has been granted authorship rights can create new procedures and distribute them to the proper departments without being overly concerned about organizational policy. We’ve also come up with an elegant approach for attaching procedures to articles. Below the article editor, you will now see a circle plus a sign for controls and procedures. Your previously written procedures will be shown here and will still be attached to relevant articles, but now you can grab other procedures and attach them as well. As an additional feature, you can also attach existing procedures to other articles. We’ve run into many cases where a single procedure is relevant to multiple articles, so rather than using a hyperlink to point to the same article, you are now free to map the procedure directly. You’ll also see that the controls tab is now gone in favor of the circle plus link below each article. Controls are easily expandable. We’ve added some helpful articles in the support area with screenshots to walk you through some subtleties of this latest release. Thank you for your continued support of PolicyCo. Resources: https://support.policyco.io/en/articles/5308417-write-a-procedure https://support.policyco.io/en/articles/5308563-attach-procedures-to-articles https://support.policyco.io/en/articles/5308633-attach-controls-to-articles Want to learn more about our compliance management software platform?

Originally published at https://policyco.io on June 8, 2021.