Approval Workflow For Policies and Procedures

admin, 9/15/2019

What do we mean by approval workflow, and why is it so important? Policies and procedures are critical to the operations of your organization, so you need to be absolutely confident that any changes made to those documents are properly authorized.

Before using a Policies and Procedures Management System, organizations would often just store their Policies and Procedures in PDF files or Word documents. The problem with these mediums is that they are open for anyone to edit, unless special network permissioning is set up. And even if that was set up, those who would be editing the documents wouldn't always be the ones who should sign off on what was written.

I remember a time when an important procedure document was deleted by someone in our team. It was a Word document and the file wasn't named correctly. They misunderstood and thought it was a document they wrote for a completed project, and that wasn't needed anymore. Luckily we were able to retrieve the file from a backup, but we wasted a lot of unnecessary time. What's even harder to track is when someone makes a small but erroneous change to a policy or procedure. They can go unnoticed for months.

Approval Workflow

This is why we need to have something called approval workflow for editing policies and procedures. With this feature anybody is able to suggest updates to articles, but that change will not be applied and visible to everyone unless it is first approved by a designated user. The original article remains untouched.

Let's say that your organization has a procedure for booking vacation time off. In that procedure it tells the user to go to the "HR System" to book their vacation, however a staff member knows that there is a specific page in the HR System to go to. They can edit the procedure, and insert text with a link to the "HR PTO System". However you wouldn't want that to apply immediately - perhaps the staff member posted the wrong link, or they missed that the actual link was somewhere else in the article.

The "redline" version

By having an approver configured, that change will then be sent to another user to review. The approver will see the exact differences between the current article and the suggested changes, in what is often referred to as a "red line" version. They can then decide whether to allow that change to be applied or not. If they reject the change, then they will provide an explanation which will be emailed to the user who made the suggestion. If they accept the change, it will then be applied to the main wiki and all users will then see it.

This is one of the central features of Staff.Wiki. It lets you set one or more approvers for each page, or you can set it on the parent pages (eg. the section), so that any changes to the section's sub-pages will also ask the section approvers before those changes will be applied.

Organization's encode some pretty important information in their policies and procedures. This is especially the case if they exist for regulation compliance purposes. Having approval workflow in your Policies and Procedures Manager can be an important aspect of protecting the operations, efficiency, quality, safety and security of your organization.

To learn more about permissioning in Staff.Wiki, click here.


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