Overhaul Policies & Procedures with SharePoint
At Gardner-Webb University, Christian compassion meets critical thinking. That mindset led Associate VP of Operations Wayne Johnson to solve a major pain point: the sprawl of policy documents. The four-year private, Baptist-related institution successfully offers outstanding undergrad and graduate education, but struggled to manage policy and procedure paperwork. Gardner-Webb University’s partnership with eGroup Enabling Technologies led to a successful transition to SharePoint.
Boiling Springs
NORTH CAROLINA
The Gardner-Webb University Mission
Fostering meaningful intellectual thought, critical analysis, and spiritual challenge within a diverse community of learning, Gardner-Webb is dedicated to higher education that integrates scholarship with Christian life.
Handling Policy Overload
“On a college campus, there are hundreds of policies,” said VP of Operations Wayne Johnson. “There are policies inside of policies, and some published only for a very small group.” Departments created their own policies, storing them in different paper and electronic locations. Without university standards, the overlap and lack of oversight created risk. As an example, Johnson said, “When a professor wrote a policy which mentioned safety, and didn’t review it with campus safety, there could be a conflict. Two voices on the same topic was a problem.”
Gain Control with SharePoint
“With SharePoint,” said Johnson, “you have a wonderful amount of control, the ability to manage versions, and built-in approval processes that are extremely easy to use.”
Gardner-Webb University identified SharePoint as an ideal repository. His team worked with eGroup Enabling Technologies, a Microsoft Gold Partner, and learned to build templates for sites, how to handle administrative hierarchy, and roll out the new service.
Gardner-Webb University no longer views policies as binders of large documents, but instead, as a compilation of smaller statements, some as small as a paragraph. “SharePoint’s meta-data tools are phenomenal,” said Johnson. ”One of the beautiful things we’ve done is that for each policy, we created a drop-down list with meta-data. If I want text to belong in multiple higher-level policies, I simply check those boxes in the scope.”
It’s an elegant way to handle policies. To the user, it’s seamless.
“When a faculty member clicks on a landing page showing a policy like the university’s safety manual,” said Johnson, “they’re seeing a clean view of all the paragraphs in the SharePoint library that have been tagged as being a part of the safety manual.” Micro-policies may appear in multiple policies, all selected in its meta-data. “Content is search friendly, sort-able, and version-able,” said Johnson. “Updates become very granular.”
Advice and Lessons Learned
Before
- No coordinated process for tracking policies
- Different departmental policies stored in different places in various states of approvals
- People used policies stored on desktops, old web links, print copies on their shelf.
- Updates were typically done via email and changes often got lost as more people got involved.
- The “true” copy was often difficult to find.
After
- One consolidated list of web-based (wiki-like) policies and documents
- The list tracks titles, the policy number, versions, availability, categorizations, etc.
- “The repository helps us from a legal and communication standpoint, not to mention helps people understand where to look.” – Wayne Johnson
- Drafts of changed and new policies can be worked by a group in real-time, using Microsoft Teams
- A one-stop location for where the true copies of a policy reside
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