Cultivating virtuous cycles in records and information management

Every records team wants to be valued by their organisation.

The challenge has always been how to get there.

The idea of a virtuous cycle is simple, the action you take creates feedback that leads in a good direction.

It is opposed to a vicious cycle - a cycle in which actions create feedback that leads in a bad direction for us.

So here are a few ideas about kinds of virtuous cycles that we need to create, and how to create them.

# 1. The financial virtuous cycle

Who has enough money in their records program?

There is one person that I know - and even he would probably love an extra staff member to make things go faster.

So what does the financial virtuous cycle look like?

It's not rocket surgery, a records team that constantly proves that the organisation gets more financial value out of it than it costs is creating a virtuous cycle that means funds will always be available to it.

The challenge is always in proving it.

The problem with most information management business cases is that they're soft business cases. What the organisation actually gets back is capacity that it can use later, or higher quality process outcomes.

The hard work of this, is providing a basis for the soft business case to be plausible.

Everyone has heard analysts say people spend a certain amount of time each day searching for routine information they need to do their job. The challenge is that no one believes those numbers, and a business unit manager KNOWS that they can get an additional FTE of capacity by adding an additional FTE. They don't know they can get an additional FTE of capacity because Gartner says people waste time looking for stuff.

To me, this really means we have to do time and motion study type work at the individual business unit level where you can show both what task took so long, and have a really robust way of showing that your intervention will make it take less time. Then you just need to write it up as a business case.

Because of the general stance on soft business cases, after that Then it's about the patient, strategic work.

This means having the business case written up in your "drawer" for the moment when the team is over capacity and starting to fail - so that you can pull it out and position it as an option where it can be compared favourably.

It also means picking the teams that you think are most likely to support you.

Finally, it means having a register of the projects you've done so that every time someone questions the financial value of the work you do, you can whip out your register and show the 10 small projects you've done each year for the last 10 years that have saved the organisation 10 FTEs.

# 2. The End User Virtuous Cycle

How many end users thank us for the work we do?

How many come back to you after you've done something asking for more?

How many tell their colleagues about how valuable the time they spent with you was?

Mostly in records, the answer to this is "not many."

When you're getting the end-user virtuous cycle right, the answer will be "lots."

So how do you create the end user virtuous cycle?

The answer is simple - you help them achieve something meaningful to them.

Being clear, this means that "helping" doesn't mean "show them how to use the records system properly rather than how they are using it."

There is also a specific kind of helping that you want to do to create a virtuous cycle.

If you help people achieve something meaningful to them, and it's a once off - ie. find me that record. You create a virtuous cycle that every time they need help, they will ask you to help them.

This kind of helping is OK - and might be a good place to start. But it can also make you the victim of past bad behavior. The simple example is that team that sticks all their documents in a single file without useful titles. Helping them find something once just perpetuates their bad behavior.

Teaching this team to use the search system so that they can find their stuff is a better idea.

The best way though, is to really understand why they're not doing the right thing, and then working with them to implement something that helps them achieve the things that are meaningful to them more effectively.

Most people struggle with how to organise their work. Many of those people also don't understand the capabilities present in the systems that the organisation already owns. Helping them understand how they can better organise their work using these systems will often provide an opportunity for you to both help them achieve results meaningful to them, and also get them to put their information in a place where you can control it.

The challenge with this idea in records, is that we're used to doing things looking backwards - capturing the representation of the event after it happened. The fundamental idea here, is that you have to help people create information that will help them remember what they were supposed to do at some point in the future.

You'll know you're doing it right when people from other business units start coming to you and saying "you know that thing you build for them, can you do something similar for me."

You'll know you're getting it wrong when people don't use the things you've built for them. Many classification schemes fall into this bucket. They don't help, they actively hinder the completion of work - and so they don't get used.

# 3. The Manager Virtuous Cycle

The manager virtuous cycle is the most powerful in the business - so I probably should have put it first.

Two of the biggest challenges in management are making work visible, and understanding work status.

Most managers have very little idea how much work their staff do or what the status of current work is - unless they ask someone. Mostly, they find out that things haven't been achieved on time when someone complains.

Generally, this means that what they need is a different view of the information that you organised to help people manage their work while you were creating the end user virtuous cycle.

Managers generally want an aggregated view of work organised by its status, or the risk that it's likely to fail to be completed on time and impact something else.

Building approvals are a classic example. In one regulatory jurisdiction, if an application isn't completed within 28 days, it gets an automatic right of legal escalation. Not surprisingly, managers in this jurisdiction want to know when something gets close to 28 days.

Ministerial communications have the same predictable path in another jurisdiction. After 28 days (why is it always 28 days and 7 years?) their non-response must be reported to the premier - so people like to keep responses under 28 days.

The point is, a nice simple way to get managers onside and asking for your help repeatedly, is to hlep them make the work their team does visible, and to help them understand the status of it relative to the deadlines that they need to meet.

Ideally, this involves you building a system or some kind of information management structure that they can just use, and that will look after itself. When you've got it right, the standard working method for the team will change to use the system that you've built, and the manager will actively police the usage of it. If you've made sure that the system also collects the records that the team creates along the way, you've created a virtuous cycle in which the manager will actively support the creation of good business information because it helps them achieve their goals.

As with the user virtuous cycle, you'll know that you're not getting this right when managers aren't policing their teams on what you've built.

# Conclusion

As always, I feel that I've done an inadequate job of explaining something that I believe is of critical importance for records management.

We have to create virtuous cycles in which users and managers are asking for our help to do things that both help them achieve their objectives, and also help us achieve our objectives.

When we don't, we can't get budget, we can't get end-user buy in, and management pay lip service to the things we need them to do for us to be effective.