When properly managed, documents enable and support an organization’s ability to complete its work and fulfill its mission. However, as documents move from person to person they have a tendency to get misplaced and mismanaged. Eventually, documents will go missing and tasks will fail to reach completion – bringing the organization’s workflow to a halt. Additionally, not effectively managing documents can put an organization at odds with state and federal laws and regulations.
Introducing and maintaining a company-wide document organization process will increase workflow efficiency and make your organization run smarter. Accomplishing this starts by getting your documents organized.
When organizing documents you need to consider what your objective and goals are. Having a clearly defined objective will make it easier for you to eventually establish your document management policy. It also serves as a check list when organizing your documents. You can compare your process to the objectives to see if you’re accomplishing what needs to be done.
Some primary objectives of organizing your documents are to:
As you begin to organize your documents, you may consider what you’re hoping to gain from this process that isn’t detailed in the objectives. Every organization has a different set of goals they hope to achieve. Thinking ahead on some of these goals may change the way you handle your documents compared to other tasks in your workflow.
Some common goals include:
Gaining control and managing your organization’s documents isn’t a one person task. It takes the combined efforts of employees and departments throughout the organization to collect, catalog, and store the documents found throughout.
Before you begin this effort, you need to have an internal discussion with key people in your organization to determine how you’re going to carry out this process. The goal is to detail the life cycle of your current document management process and determine what can stay the same and what needs to be changed.
Once these questions are answered, they’ll serve as the blueprint to organizing your documents. If a question doesn’t apply to your organization, skip it.
Questions to answer:
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