University ITSM

As I mentioned last fall, we manage our continual service improvement program quarter by quarter: each quarter we select certain critical projects, and then as we have time we "pick up" other work and add it to our list.

Separate but related to this concept of quarterly improvement "releases," we have also created a "semi-annual governing document review." Twice a year we get several relevant staff members together to review our "governing documents"--our policies, standards, and procedures. We don't make major changes, but we make sure that everything makes sense together, uses the latest template, etc.

We've done this twice now. It's nice to be able to rely on this review, because as we update our templates or rename our teams, we can know that the next review will catch the updates and we can implement all these queued updates.

One thing I'm starting to do is create an intranet wiki page for each document as we identify possible changes, so we can refer to this wiki page when we perform the review. For example, with our "Staff access procedure," maybe I realize that this procedure is missing a step, but it's a low-priority change. I can put that on the document's wiki page, and then when we perform the semi-annual review we can incorporate all these low-priority changes.

I have a few ideas for how we could expand our review; it could include

• our policies and standards (still)
• our procedures (still)
• our templates
• our internal glossary
• everything else in our document repository

We have also already talked about planning other work around the semi-annual document review. For example:

1. Staff activity to identify possible errors or minor improvements
2. Review and possible update of templates
3. Semi-annual governing document review based on updated templates
4. Staff training on the updated governing documents

Release management is often applied to software or infrastructure releases but it can be just as useful for procedures and policies!