October 24, 2022

Building a Records Management Playbook, Part 1: What's a Playbook?

This originally appeared as an article on the ARMA Magazine website on 9/26/2022, Build and Sustain Your Records Program with a Records Management Playbook.

Part 2: The Playbook Structure

Part 3: How to Build a Records Management Playbook

What if your organization’s entire records team won the lottery today and quit? What would happen to your records program? How long would it take your organization to rebuild the team from scratch? If you had a records management playbook in place, your newly hired team could hit the ground running!

What is a Playbook?

In sports, a playbook describes the “plays” a team executes to accomplish its goals and objectives—generally, winning a game or match. Plays are tailored to specific circumstances: the team’s personnel and capabilities, the opponent’s capabilities, and the specifics of the in-game situation. Some plays just do not come up very often, while others are executed regularly throughout the game. Some plays only come up at the end of a period of play or towards the end of the game. And once the game is over, the coaching staff reviews the plays and the team’s execution of them and makes changes to get ready for the next match. 

Similarly, a business playbook describes the plays that a particular organization, department, or work process executes to accomplish its goals and objectives. Larger or more mature organizations might have multiple playbooks, while smaller or less mature organizations might have everything in a single playbook. 

In this article we will focus on the records management playbook—that list of plays that a records program will execute on an ongoing basis. Different records programs will operate at different levels of maturity, so some programs will include more plays in their playbook than others. And different organizations have different cultures, and the playbook needs to reflect those realities as well. 

So how is this different from a standard operating procedures (SOP) manual? The playbook is like an SOP in that it lists the things to be done and some detail about how to do them. But plays go beyond just the tasks and activities required to include things like metrics, references, and key players. It also includes cultural values and mechanisms for making decisions when the play is not so clear-cut. We will look at the structure of the playbook and the plays in more detail in a subsequent post.

It is also the case that in many organizations, SOPs were written years or even decades ago. Because they tend to be scattered around the organization, they are not maintained well, and because of that, there is often a significant divergence between what the SOP says in describing a process and how that process actually gets done. Again, the playbook can provide value by having everything in one place and in a readily maintainable format. 

Through a playbook, the organization can: 

  • Identify and implement best practices and standards
  • Ensure that operational practices are consistent, repeatable, and standardized to the extent possible
  • Ensure resources and priorities are aligned to common goals
  • Train new employees to perform within the guidelines, become a part of the desired culture, and develop shared values
  • Ensure that important expertise, on which their business results depend, does not walk out the door when employees are unavailable, transition to a different role, or leave the company

The records management playbook’s objective is to provide best practices for the records program, not to substitute for management and leadership. It is critical to balance the importance of standards and guidelines with the value of local management discretion and individual employee creativity (and see https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/what-is-a-playbook-in-business).

Another way to look at the records management playbook is that it contains what someone would need to know to execute the various tasks required to sustain the records management program over the course of thirty, sixty, or ninety days—even up to a year. What are the things you do, create, monitor, or report regularly? What are the questions you answer every day or every week? These should be in your playbook. 

The playbook is a living document. As the team develops new processes, they should be turned into plays and added to the playbook. As the team updates, streamlines, or adds processes to reflect changes in the organization, its technology, or legal or regulatory requirements, the team should also update the plays in the playbook. The playbook thus becomes the sole source of truth for all things involved with and related to your records program. 

What the Playbook is Not

At the same time, the playbook should reflect the reality of what is done and how it is done. It makes no sense to write a play about disposing of legacy emails if legacy emails are not in fact being disposed of. In other words, it is not a list of best practices and the ideal world if time and resources were no object. Rather, your playbook should be accurate as to what you are currently doing, and as your program matures, those changes should be reflected in the playbook. 

It is also not a list of how some other organization does things. A different organization, even in the same industry and jurisdiction and similarly sized, will have a different level of maturity, different organizational culture, and different personalities involved. It might be helpful to look at another organization’s records management playbook for ideas and completeness, but you should not try to implement its playbook as-is in your organization. 

This also means that plays should include some amount of flexibility, because things change, and sometimes the circumstances require that a play be executed differently. Inflexible adherence to whatever is described in a particular play may miss something and will tend to encourage employees to ignore it. Again, with effective leadership and management, this sort of flexibility should not be a major issue. 

Similarly, it is helpful to distinguish between plays which are executed on some sort of a regular basis, with projects which may be executed much less frequently. For example, how often will you change recordkeeping applications? You probably don’t need a “Select and Implement New Recordkeeping Application” play in your playbook. You need a process to follow, to be sure, but that is not a play. 

The Benefits of Using a Records Management Playbook

The benefits of having, and using, a records management playbook include :

  • Organization: The playbook includes all the information your records management team needs to operate successfully, in one organized and easy-to-access place.
  • Efficiency: The team can save time when they have questions about workflows or procedures, because the answers are in the playbook. They can follow the steps outlined in the document rather than searching through numerous files, locations, and resources to find information. And if it is digital, and why wouldn’t it be, supporting resources can be linked to directly within the play. 
  • Work quality: The playbook includes references, standards, checklists, and templates that align with the organization’s existing policy and quality frameworks. Work output will become better and more consistent as a result.
  • Employee training: A playbook makes it easier to onboard new team members and roles and help them get up to speed quickly. 
  • Independence: Employees can refer to the playbook instead of asking their managers for help for those plays that are included in the playbook. Similarly, supervisors can trust their employees to do quality and accurate work without constant management because they have a playbook for guidance.

In the next post, I'll look at the structure of the playbook. 

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