What do your IT policies and procedures look like? Are they clearly defined? Are they even written down anywhere?

If you don’t have confident answers to all of these questions, you are in good company. Many organizations overlook the importance of clear policies and procedures, specifically as they relate to IT.

Not to worry, you’re about to take a crash course in IT policies and procedures. They can improve your business rather than serve as its anchor.

What Do IT Policies and Procedures Accomplish?

Before we get into the how of it all, let’s answer another important question. Why? Why does any of this matter?

Policies and procedures impact many aspects of a business. Even when we narrow the scope to IT policies and procedures, they can dictate compliance (to avoid fines or other regulatory impedances), speed up or slow down workflows, and ultimately impact the bottom line.

The fact is that your IT managed services provider in Omaha and Lincoln, NE needs clear guidelines for a number of circumstances to make sure they can properly and efficiently take care of your technology.

Policies lay out expectations for every role in the organization. They clarify responsibility and accountability, and they resolve disputes before they even occur.

Meanwhile, procedures affect workflow. They standardize practices. By doing so, they enable you to closely monitor how well your processes function and where you can make efficient improvements that bring the largest gains.

In short, effective policies and procedures can help you work better, faster, and smarter, making more money while enhancing security and compliance. They touch every facet of the organization, and when leveraged well, they bring solid improvements.

Best Practices for Implementing IT Policies and Procedures

If you’re sold that you need good policies and procedures, what are you supposed to do about it? How do you actually get your teams and people to follow through on them?

There is no perfect answer, but the six tips below will cover the most common obstacles.

Planning

Planning precedes the successful implementation of any organizational change. That certainly applies to laying out IT procedures and policies. 

When planning, a few concepts can help focus your strategy and improve your margin of success.

First, work with your managed IT provider in Omaha and Lincoln, NE. They will discuss your business goals with you to help you lay out policies and procedures that move the organization toward those goals.

From there, identify responsibilities. Certain procedures will already lay out who carries out specific tasks, but the plan also should outline accountability to maintain the policies and procedures. If someone or something goes in another direction, how is it corrected? Who is accountable when team members don’t buy into the plan? Answering these questions will help with disseminating the plan later.

Buy-In

The next step in implementation is buy-in. This needs to happen before you roll out the new policies and procedures across the organization. It also has to start at the top and work its way down.

Senior leadership should all agree to the importance of policies and procedures before you even consider writing them. Any holdouts here will create more holdouts across the teams. That might mean negotiating the changes to ensure everyone at the top is on board, but it has to start there.

Following senior leadership, the rest of management should be briefed on the details. They also have to buy into following a policy or procedure is important.  They will encourage their direct reports to execute on procedures and also help hold team members accountable as needed. s. 

With management in the fold, an effort to win over the rest of your personnel finishes buy-in. Start by explaining the changes so everyone understands the goals and how the changes should help.

Add some incentives to the conversation, and you can promote strong buy-in from the outset.

Start Small

At this point, you have a plan, and the people are committed. That is not a green light to simply roll out all of your changes and expect the best.

Instead, it’s usually best to start small and implement some changes with small, selected groups. See how things go. Work out the kinks. Try not to overload anyone with too many changes too suddenly.

Small test groups show you the most obvious aspects of what does and does not work, allowing you to make adjustments before you disseminate policies and procedures to the rest of your staff.

It’s the beginning of an iterative process (more on that in a later section) that stabilizes your implementation and builds policies and procedures that better serve the organization.

Create a Schedule

As testing runs its course and additional changes are made to the procedure, it is now time to map out a rollout schedule.. Picturing and planning for the implementation in your organization will assist your decision-making. 

Now that you have a better idea of what implementation looks like, you can make a more realistic schedule that sets dates on when each part of the organization will be utilizing the full scope of the new policies or procedures.

When you commit to a schedule and show it to the whole organization, it creates gentle pressure that keeps things moving. Personnel strive to keep the schedule, and that helps stabilize your plans.

In many cases, you may have to revise the schedule as you go. That doesn’t undermine the purpose of the schedule. Even amended, it serves as a driving force to maintain forward momentum.

Iterate

You already explored the idea of iteration by rolling out your policies and procedures in small stages. It doesn’t stop there.

Iteration is ongoing. Even after the whole company successfully adopts your new rules, you will continue to iterate. You can observe how well the policies are followed and how successfully the procedures take you toward your goals.

Analyze that information and revise as needed.

When you embrace iteration, you gain a few advantages.

The most obvious is that you refine your policies and procedures to fit changes in the organization, its systems, and its teams.

Less obvious is how an iterative mindset helps establish your culture. When everyone understands the commitment to iteration from the start, it’s easier to accommodate the idea that updates will come at some point. It’s less of a frustration and more of an opportunity to fix things that don’t quite work right yet.

KPIs

Iteration will reach its full potential when you identify, measure, and analyze key performance indicators (KPIs).

You’re looking at ways to measure how well employees follow the policies and procedures. You’re also trying to measure how those policies and procedures impact workflows and the bottom line.

You will have to decide which KPIs matter most to you, but a few sample ideas can help you get started.

Consider an internal audit that specifically looks at compliance for a particular IT policy or procedure. That audit can put a hard number on how many employees follow the rules and/or how often they stray from policy.

You can also look at time to delivery to see how procedural changes impact various workflows.

A third option could compare overall outputs to see if the policy changes correlate with any type of productivity or revenue growth.

These KPIs are just the beginning. When you figure out what you want to measure, then you can use analytics to guide your iterations. You know exactly what works and how well.

These tips can help you form your plan and successfully implement new IT policies and procedures in the workplace. Paired with a strong effort from your managed IT support in Omaha, you can build your organization up to its greatest heights.