How to Create the WORST ServiceNow Policy Program

Inversion thinking is a powerful tool, allowing us to figure out what we must do by exploring what we absolutely should not do. It can also be entertaining.

We’re going to be diving into actions that will guarantee an awful policy management program and then invert them at the end, listing out essential practices that will ensure success. Some will be humorous and clearly taken to the extreme, but that’s really the point of this kind of thought process: highlighting how some minor gaps or missteps can prevent a program from reaching its full potential.

So, without further ado, here are seven ways to guarantee an ineffective policy management program:

#1. Write governance documents in a vacuum without thought toward any compliance obligations. Don’t base requirements on the laws, regulations, frameworks, or industry standards our organization is trying to follow. Life is lived in the moment, fire from the hip and write from what’s top of mind.

#2. Let the policies become dinosaurs. Outdated text and requirements will eventually rob even the best policies of their power. Workforce practices will evolve, causing a gap between what our stale policies say we do and what we actually do. We’re busy. There is a lot of work on our plates already, do we really need to update our policies? Give that can a big kick down the road, we’ll have more time next year.

#3. Leave them under a rock. Post them to an obscure corner on our SharePoint site. Don’t launch a coordinated campaign to publicize the policies; send out a single email with a link to all employees, no acknowledgement necessary. Everyone will notice the email and read what’s applicable to them as they need to.

#4. Treat policies as a check-the-box activity. Having governance documents in place is good enough. Remove their teeth, ignore exceptions, and prevent them from having any meaningful impact on how our company operates. Let everyone work independently without an overarching strategy.

#5. Fail to develop supporting governance documentations. Have lofty policies without any actionable guidance. Decline to write granular standards, procedures and guidelines that are more closely related to the day-to-day activities of the workforce. Let everyone interpret the high-level requirements as they see fit.

#6. Make the policies confusing or incomplete. Organize them haphazardly without a consistent structure or framework. Put everything in a single large document, combine sections, and use different layouts. Table of contents? Terms and definitions? Never heard of them.

#7. Impair the review and approval process. Maximize friction through redundant complexity, the over-involvement of tertiary stakeholders, and a lot of tedious clicks in the platform. Or better yet, ignore the review and approval process altogether, allowing the author to unilaterally publish policies without input from essential parties.

And there it is. These seven activities would make for a truly terrible policy management program, yet even a milder form of these actions could be enough to prevent success. Inverting them however gives us the blueprint for an effective policy management program:

#1 – Base policies on the laws, regulations, standards, and frameworks your organization desires to achieve compliance with.

#2 – Have a process for the regular review and update of governance documentation.

#3 – Educate the workforce and facilitate adoption through a coordinated policy acknowledgement campaign.

#4 – Enforce and proactively utilize governance documents to drive workforce activities.

#5 – Develop supporting standards, processes, procedures, and guidelines to bolster the overarching policy documents.

#6 – Organize governance documents with an intentional framework and leverage a standardized template for their contents.

#7 – Use a straightforward, common-sense approval process, ensuring applicable stakeholders are involved as appropriate in an efficient manner.

The Policy Management application within ServiceNow can be designed and implemented to incorporate each of these principles, often in an automated fashion. Please reach out to info@lionwarellc.com if you would like to learn how.

Your success is our mission.

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