Munchausen Consulting Corporation: The Solution

The automated system of publishing the company policies and procedures will provide the following benefits:

• It will reduce the cost associated with publishing.

• It will speed up the creation and publication of the employee handbook.

• Employees can access the policies at any time from all the branches as well as customer sites.

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  It will be possible to refer to old policies to identify the exact change in an existing policy.

• It will be possible to search for a particular policy based on a specified criterion.

The head of the IT department has assigned this project to a team, which consists of a project manager and two developers. The team studied the solution requirements and identified that the solution needs to be a reference application. The users of this application, the company employees, will use this application to refer to the company policies. The employees should be able to refer to these policies at any time from all the branches and customer sites. To implement this solution, the development team has decided to use Domino Designer R6. The reference application should provide the following features:

• Content Organization

• Content Publishing

• Personalization

The details of these features are discussed in the following sections.

Content Organization

The reference application is a repository of all company policies, procedures, guidelines, regulations, and formats to be used for various purposes, such as the leave application form. To enable the employees to use the application in an easy and efficient manner, the application needs to organize the content in the most appropriate manner. The content organization should map to the manual employee handbook so that the employees can relate to it when using the application. Therefore, the application organizes the content as follows in the next sections.

Parts

Parts, identified by a part number and a part title, are the first and highest level of organization. Parts are the logical organizational elements. The application is divided into the following five parts:

• Policies. This part contains all the company policies.

• Procedures. This part contains all the procedures and processes that are required to be followed by employees.

• Guidelines. This part contains the guidelines, which help the employees to avoid the usual pitfalls and mistakes they tend to make during consulting assignments.

• Statutory regulations. This part contains government regulations and laws that employees should be aware of during their tenure of employment with the company.

• Forms to be used. This part contains all the forms that the employees need to fill up. Examples of such forms are leave application forms, transfer request forms, loan application forms, employee benefits form, tax return filing forms, and so on.

Chapters

A part is further divided into chapters, which are logical organization elements and are used to group logically related content or documents. A chapter number and chapter title identify each chapter.

Sections

A section is the basic unit that holds the content. A section title identifies each section. Within a section, you can organize the content using various formatting features, such as headings, bullet lists, number lists, tables, and so on.

Table of Contents

The TOC (Table of Contents), as used in a manual employee handbook, helps identify the complete content organization in the application. It lists part elements at the top of the hierarchy, followed by chapters and sections.

Index

The index, as used in the manual employee handbook, is placed at the end of the book and contains an alphabetical listing of the subject along with the page numbers. An index helps users to quickly locate the page numbers through known words or phrases in the content.

The basic purpose of an index, to locate the required information, is solved by implementing search features in the application. Users can use this feature to locate all of the documents that contain a particular word or phrase. Therefore, the more powerful search feature can replace the index in the application.

Additional Features

To improve the user experience, it is a good idea to add certain features, which are over and above the basic application functioning. Following are the additional features of the application.

Personalization

The application will allow users to drag-and-drop the documents they refer to most to a particular area called MyReferences. In this manner, each user will have his own area where he can keep the most wanted documents and therefore quickly refer to them without following the complete navigational structure.

Highlighting New Documents

The application provides a mechanism by which the unread documents can be tracked. The documents, which are not yet identified by the user, are highlighted using a specific color. After the user reads a particular document, the document is highlighted with a different color. The application will maintain this feature on a per-user basis.

Tracking Changes

Whenever an existing policy or procedure is revised, it is required to track the old one. That will help users to understand the changes carried out to an existing document by comparing it with the older one. The application will allow the content authors to update the existing documents with version tracking.

Publishing

The content authors cannot be expected to complete the entire writing at one go. The application should provide a "Save as Draft" feature to address this problem. The documents that are saved using the Save as Draft feature will not be visible to the users, who include the readers, of the system. When the document is completely authored and the author uses the Publish option, the document will be made available to the readers.