The Principles of Policy Management: Collaborative

Is your organization's policy management framework collaborative and coordinated across your entire organization? Policy management requires collaboration as policies are developed across departments and apply to employees across the organization. In OCEG’s Policy Management Capability Model, it outlines 10 universal principles of policy management - the seventh being collaborative.

“Good policy management involves coordination and collaboration across a range of departments and roles in the organization,” the Model states. “It is necessary to engage and collaborate on policy management as well as on individual policy authoring.”

In order to develop a collaborative policy management framework, your organization needs:

• Policies that are vertically collaborative. They need to be supported and engaged by top executives.
• Policies that are horizontally collaborative. They need to be coordinated and managed consistently across departments.
• Policies that are collaborative from a technology standpoint. Policy authoring and approval should use modern collaboration capabilities where multiple people can work on the policy at the same time with full audit trails, editing, and commenting - moving away from linear document check-in and check-out policy collaboration.
• Policies that are collaborative from the bottom-up. Employees/individuals on the front lines should provide input into policies and be heard and understood in policy development.