Reconciling your company’s legal citations and best practices on the draft records retention schedule is a ten darn-it [1]job.
One. When you realize that an automated inventory is not a priority for IT; therefore, you must perform manual inventories with each department.
Two. After you’ve entered your search parameters in Legal Database you realize based on experience that the results have only returned about 65% of the citations you’ll need to complete the draft. The rest of the legal research is on your shoulders.
Three. Creating the mathematical formula to weigh if a citation should become a best practice (hint: visualizing a tornado diagram helps).
Four. Tracking the changes for citations and best practices between the published version of the schedule and your new one.
Five. Once you’ve assigned what you believe to be all relevant citations to a (ahem!) functional section, you’ve found more citations and it throws your index alpha-numeric assignments off between the master list of citations and the functional template.
Six. The meeting in which IT asserts, “yes, this is what the law says, but the environment is designed to retain this data for (insert date range here) only”.[2]
Seven. Justifying the enablement of knowledge management as a choice for some records series at the end of their periods.
Eight. Mapping orphan servers to records series.
Nine. Balancing the need to socialize with colleagues too and not just immerse oneself in the schedule project. Remembering to operate in business at the speed of thought!
Ten. Realizing the amount of time this project is actually taking.
The good news? Trust is everything—you’re building vital relationships one-at-a-time and you’re gaining excellent project management experience. Be positive throughout the entire experience (yes, even at 3am!) and remember the light at the end of the tunnel. Remember, too, the schedule must be as nimble as possible to support the years to come and electronic records driven. I’ll give you a few erecords hints in a future post.
[1]NOT the word I’d use, but this is a family show, after all.
[2]We love them anyway, though, don’t we? Your best friends, the IT Lads.
#Records-Management #ElectronicRecordsManagement #recordsretentionschedule #recordsseries