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Designing a Document Management Strategy
Article #5:
Document Management Strategy and The "Pareto Principle"
(Read more articles in this series)
By Kevin Craine
The number of documents found within an organization can be so overwhelming that it paralyzes attempts to design and implement a document management strategy. In my book, "Designing a Document Management Strategy," I contend that the "Pareto Principle" is an effective model to use to get your hands around the scope of your efforts.
While there may be thousands of documents in your organization, the central question is: What are the documents that drive the essential functions of your organization? Chances are good that only a few documents are absolutely indispensable to your business. You don't necessarily need to re-engineer every document. Start your strategy with only the most essential.
The Pareto Principle
Joseph Juran, a venerable leader of the Total Quality Management movement, coined the concept of the "Pareto Principle" in the 1950s after he observed that the majority of problems result from only a few causes. Juran named the rule after Vilfredo Pareto, a 19th century Italian economist, who determined that eighty percent of the wealth in Milan was owned by only twenty percent of the people. Some people refer to this idea as the "80-20 rule." Juran first applied the notion in a practical sense by suggesting that poor quality can often be successfully addressed by attacking the few major causes that result in most of the problems.
Target Documents - the "Vital Few"
If you could select only a handful of documents to target in your strategy, which ones would they be? As Juran might suggest, identifying the "vital few" documents within your organization will direct your attention to those documents that are the most important and ensure a more fruitful return on your effort.
Consider these questions during your assessment:
- Which documents have the biggest influence on our numbers and measures?
- Which help manage the needs, pressures and constraints of doing business?
- Which contribute to meeting our specific goals and objectives?
- Which serve your overall mission and vision?
- Which are the most troublesome in terms of support, errors and efficiency?
- Which are the most costly to create, produce and process?
- Which have the biggest influence on customer satisfaction?
- Which have the biggest influence on efficiency?
- Which serve important strategic initiatives?
By adhering to the "Pareto Principle" you can reduce the seemingly overwhelming scope of your document management strategy to a more manageable project. Concentrate only on those documents that are vitally important. You may find that there are several, or only a few, that absolutely essential for your business to run. During your assessment, you will likely find a number of documents that are redundant, obsolete or out-of-date. If a document is not part of the solution, it's probably part of the problem. Now is a good time to identify those documents that may be no longer useful and consider eliminating them.
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