School policy management

[mrbios]

Not really an IT task this but hopefully some of you have something you can recommend based on what your admin/governance staff utilise...

 

Currently between governors, heads PA and clerk to the governors there is email attachments galore. Word docs made into PDFs, which get converted to docs again, formatting gets messed up, it takes the heads PA forever to get on top of it all....at the moment i've been dragged in to fix some formatting and i've realised how cumbersome the whole process is and i want to fix that. I've been dragged in because the heads PA is so busy with 100 different tasks, and it seems i can improve her role somewhat here...

 

Bear in mind I'm aware i could set all this up in SharePoint/Teams but I'd rather something slightly more customised to the job to make it as easy and self-managable as possible by the staff involved, without us having to get involved with it. The most we ever do is upload the PDF of a policy to our website, but even then the heads PA knows how to do it and has specific acess rights to do so. So what we're after is:

A system where by the policies are uploaded and then managed and edited entirely online. NO COPIES! (So many duplicates right now...)

Review dates can be flagged and addressed easily (I notice one of these systems had a nice traffic light style system for this)

Access rights for those responsible for each policy can be defined easily so that they can edit their own policy, and governors can review.

 

From a quick googling i've found TheSchoolBus Policy Manager, and CompliancePod Policy Manager are two systems that might fit what we're after. Does anyone happen to know what these systems cost (Trying to avoid having to go through the sales pitch to at least get an idea of what they cost first...) or know of any alternatives that might fit with what we want?

Edited November 22, 2024 by mrbios

[3s-gtech]

We have three folders in our shares.

Draft policies (Word documents)

Current policies (PDFs, governor approved)

Archived policies (old PDFs).

 

It's supposed to be 'edit the Draft policies only!' but they do love pinging them across by email still. I was asked to set this system up, and I'm pretty tough on them using it - "oh, you've edited the wrong version as that was saved in your home drive. Now do it all again, this time starting with the governor approved copy".

 

The draft goes to governors, gets approved, then is PDF'd and goes into current and distributed.

 

When someone asks me how to edit a PDF policy, they get shouted at.

[psydii]

Process for us is as per above, except for now the PA does the shouting. Works very well.

 

Recently discovered, after a decade of guilt, that *nobody* reviews/updates their policies on time.

[Olliedawg]

We've had the same issue. We now do something similar to what 3s-gtech said.

 

I re formatted all of our policies because they were a right mess. Took over a week & a half to sort them all, among still doing my normal duties.

[mavhc]

someone asked me why I read the policies before uploading them, I said someone should, and btw do you want to change to be the actual school name?

 

Should be able to do it all in sharepoint and power automate https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/parallel-modern-approvals

 

Bonus points for adding expiry dates

[slugshead]

Last school used this, current school were impressed when I suggested and arranging a demo. Implementing in the new year

 

https://www.weareevery.com/compliance_manager/

[Roberto]

someone asked me why I read the policies before uploading them, I said someone should, and btw do you want to change to be the actual school name?

 

Should be able to do it all in sharepoint and power automate https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/parallel-modern-approvals

 

Bonus points for adding expiry dates

 

Yeah, this is exactly what power automate and sharepoint workflows were designed for.