Importance of a Proper Control Framework Around Template Management

Common Issues and Solutions

Does your organization lack any policy (or otherwise) driven rules about maintaining your templates?

Are you or your colleagues squirrelling away versions of templates on your desktop or personal folders for use without checking to see if they have been updated or are indeed still in use?Have you ever sent out the wrong version of a template and had to write that embarrassing email to your client or colleague attaching the right version?

Are your organization’s templates found in various internal folders, intranets and/or team SharePoint sites, making them hard to find?

Are you or your colleagues using various versions of the same template as a starting point for negotiations?

If you answered yes to even one of the above, please read on!

The challenges of contractual risk are faced by many functions, not just legal. Marketing, Finance, IT, HR, and Knowledge Management (the list goes on) all typically refer to standard sets of templates used for internal and external purposes.  

These templates, more often than not from my experience, are found in varying locations (including personal desktops!), are out of date and have no formal guidelines around the method and timings for reviews – i.e. what should be reviewed, how often and by whom.  The consequences of the failure to properly store, manage and update templates are not just about the embarrassment of having to email out the correct template version - they can be considerably more dire. Out-of-date terms may lead to litigation, fines by regulatory agencies, loss of business and/or serious reputational damage. As such, it is vital that organizations implement proper guidelines and control frameworks around the management of their templates. 
 
Regardless of whether your organization has 250,000 employees or 250 employees, there are a plethora of things to consider before implementing any new policy and control framework designed to meet said policy requirements.  To help get you started (and based on the considerable experience I’ve had with implementing template control frameworks within a large-scale organization), here is a breakdown of what I think are some of the key questions to start asking (sooner rather than later!) – broken down into 3 phases.

1. The Audit Phase: What is the current state of template management in our organization?

• How many templates do we have?
• How many of these templates are sent out to clients, and how many are sent out internally
• How many versions of each template do we have?
• Where are these templates stored?
• Are employees able to save them on their desktops?
• Who is sending them out?
• Is anyone regularly updating them?
• When were they last updated?

2. The Definition Phase: Definition of the Future State of Template Management

• Can we standardize any of the templates?
• Can we control who uses which templates and where they are stored?
• How often do we want to review them?
• Are all templates created equal? i.e. do some require more frequent reviews?
• Who should be reviewing them?
• Where can we keep all of the templates once updated/standardized? i.e. what will be the ‘Golden Source’ for templates going forward?
• How do we know when a template needs to be reviewed and when it was last reviewed? i.e. How do we capture template-specific metadata that allows us to see and, indeed, maintains this information?

3. The Planning and Implementation Phase: We know what we want the future state to look like, but how do we get there?

• Do we have any internal resources who can help implement these changes?
• Based on the audit findings and the future state agreed, how do we structure the implementation? i.e. what timelines are we looking at, what are the implementation phases, and who is the sponsor?
• Who are the subject matter experts and, ultimately, the decision-makers?
• How do we communicate these changes and the benefits of the changes internally and gain the support of our peers in this initiative?

Conclusion

As you can see, there is a lot to consider, and this is where Kim Document can help.  Kim Document is designed to, amongst other things, facilitate robust management of your templates. Kim helps drive consistency of templates used, provides for easy audit trails, helps manage governance and increases your organization's day-to-day workflow visibility.

Kim turns the daunting task of managing templates into a pleasurable, organized and rewarding experience. Your teams can turn your templates into easily configurable web form applications, share them easily via our campaign feature or published linked functionality and ultimately manage them in one central system (the ‘golden source’ if you will!).  No coding is needed. 

Furthermore, you can be up and running in 10 minutes by using our ready-made template solutions available to you at no extra cost.  If you are ready to take control of your organization’s templates and are interested in seeing how Kim Document can help, book a demo today.