How Bad Events Can Improve Policies

Is your organization consistently and continuously monitoring the metrics from your issues, cases, investigations, incidents, and complaints? These are indicators where organizations need a policy, or a policy is failing, or a policy can be improved, or simply needs to be communicated.

Learning from your mistakes is how we grow, both as individuals and when we work together as a collective. A critical component of your organizations policy management program is whether it can identify and take action to address lessons learned incidents and complaints.

Many organizations struggle with siloed policy and issue management processes that require significant time and resources to manage effectively across the organization. A structured policy management process built on the Policy Capability Model provides feedback and metrics from these areas to improve the written policies and their awareness and communication.

One key component of the PCM is the Improve component in which the organization establishes “methods to periodically review and improve policies, retire policies, and to evaluate the design, effectiveness, and operation of the policy management capability.” This involves the Revision and Redesign of policies. Key elements in this component of the model are:

• Establishing a change assessment process to ensure policies are what the organization needs
• Define and monitor metrics, such as incidents and issues related to policies to determine how policies should be improved, changed, or communicated better

To accomplish this requires that the organization has a fully integrated policy management strategy and process to bring these elements into contextual awareness and structured review.