Release management and the importance of living documentation
It is a known fact that providers need policies and processes to register for the NDIS and pass the audit. They are necessary to meet the standards of the new National Quality and Safeguarding Framework. However, compliance for providers should not stop there. Providers must continually and regularly update their policies and processes to keep up with the ever-changing NDIS. They should be living documents routinely accessed and utilised by employees across the organisation. Having live documents ensures your organisation is meeting its compliance obligations. They also show your commitment to delivering safe supports to NDIS participants.
To have living documents, you need a system for managing compliance documentation. A business management system (BMS) is the best option for managing documents. A BMS prevents compliance documents from being siloed and duplicated and allows for the free and easy flow of information across a business. A BMS ensures that staff can easily find correct and up-to-date document when they need it.
The next step is to ensure that your policies and processes can be updated to reflect any changes in regulation and appropriately reflect your business. Documents should not be static and outdated with old information. So how can you go about updating a policy or process to reflect important changes? You need a tool to edit a draft version of a document, while still enabling employees to see current, published content. You must have a system to ensure that team members or mangers can review the document, and provide their approval to publish it. Such a tool is needed to ensure changes are agreed on and documents are of a high standard before being published. Finally, you should have a means to automatically notify all users of changes via email so they stay up-to-date.
One type of solution is to have a feature in your system that manages the release of changes. This type of feature gives you more control over content and its quality. It ensures documents are consistent across the organisation. A system of review enables the sharing of information and encourages collaboration, saving time and ensuring information is not lost. Most importantly, you end up with a live, published document which is the single source of truth for your organisation.
The Centro business management system includes release management for Centro PROFESSIONAL and Centro BUSINESS software applications. The new feature enables you to make changes in draft, while allowing viewers to see only content that has already been drafted, reviewed and published. It facilitates the review and approval of changes using an easy to follow workflow, giving you the ability to see who approved a document and follow the publishing cycle of documentation. You are also given the option to publish a set of changes or just make a simple fix. The release management feature has recently been updated with the ability to record when a policy has been approved, and when the next review date is. Even better, there is the option to send out an email notification for a change release to all users.
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