Making ‘normal’ and ‘good’ easy to see.

October 31, 2022
… where ‘normal’ (or ‘good’) is the predetermined acceptable standard. A recent project with Lachlan Shire Council has taught me (Ben) a lot. Although, upon reflection, I’m now wondering why it took me so long. Let me show you what I learnt.

The project is around records management and, although the title isn’t glorified, when we got down to answering the purpose, the why this is important … it is really important.

The why, taken directly from the Output Standard, is Quickly find the electronically filed required record. Currently there are over 6000 folders. When the records are stored, they will need to be found at some time and in many cases by someone other than the person who filed the record.’

When we dug deeper, we found the title people use to store the records differs from person to person.

In the past I feel I would have tried to bridge this gap by ‘training people’ in records management. I most probably would have started with the team creating a process, a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) or the likes. Then, training the staff in following this SOP.

But in this case, we started with defining what a good record looks like. The aim was to make it as obvious as this picture, to make an objective measure, that way anyone can ‘spot the difference’.

Making ‘normal’ and ‘good’ easy to see. -

Once a ‘good record’ was defined, we were then in the very best position to ask and capture the answer to the question … what does the person need to do to create this ‘good record’?

It’s early days yet but what I’ve learned is once you make the Output Standard (remember, predetermined), this ‘pulls’ the People Standard. The People Standard became very, very simple to capture.

Still learning …