COURSE OVERVIEW:

Maybe your employees already grasp the importance of following policies and procedures. How can you ensure your staff follows through on your steps toward compliance?

Publishing policies and procedures in any organisation is not as easy as it may seem. While it may be simple to write policies and procedures and distribute them. Writing policies and procedures that are easily understood and applied involves analysing, writing, publishing, training, communicating, measuring, and continuously improving business processes and published policies and procedures.

Policy writers often take for granted that users will follow policies and procedures because they believe they have done everything necessary to write, publish, and train effective policies and procedures.

Unfortunately, policy writers really do not know if their policies and procedures are being accepted, understood, and applied unless an effort is put forth to meet with the users (after the publication of policies and procedures) and verify that the policies and procedures are being used and to what extent.

The policy writer must use a verification process to determine the extent of compliance and to show management and the users that the published policies and procedures are effective and represent "fact" and not just the opinions of those researching and writing the policies and procedures.

A compliance plan consists of guidelines to help the policy writer distinguish fact from opinion. A compliance plan consists of tools or methods used to measure business processes, policies, or procedures. Published policies and procedures are statements of opinions until measured using standard compliance methods.

This course is designed to help you achieve, or work toward, compliance of your business processes, policies, and procedures. It shows how to design a compliance plan and use it through self-assessment checklists, continuous improvement tools and audits.

The first part of this course explains how to develop a compliance plan using checklists, check sheets, scatter diagrams, run charts, control charts, histograms, Pareto charts, and systems audits to measure the compliance and stability of business processes, policies, and procedures. Then explains how a checklist is used by members of the target audiences to verify they are correctly applying a business process, policy, or procedure as it was originally intended.

The second part explores the fifteen continuous improvement tools that could be used to assist with the processing and improvement of business processes, policies, and procedures. Then discusses the use of five quality tools when determining the compliance and stability of business processes, policies, or procedures. Finally, explains how to do systems audits to identify system failures and operating deficiencies in business processes, policies and procedures.

LEARNING OUTCOMES:

By the end of this course, you will be able to understand:

• What is a compliance plan?
• How to get to total compliance?
• How to design and carry out a compliance plan?
• How to establish a compliance plan?
• The verification process for policies and procedures
• How measurements are key to improvement?
• How to do measurements of specific attributes in an organisation?
• The policies and procedures improvement cycle (PPIC)
• The compliance plan layout
• The commonly used compliance methods for policies and procedures
• How to use the compliance plan?
• The benefits of using a self-assessment checklist
• How to develop a self-assessment checklist?
• The steps for designing and processing a checklist?
• The assessment preparation table
• How to evaluate the results?
• How to use continuous improvement tools to measure compliance?
• The importance of metrics and measurements
• How to perform measurements of specific attributes in an organisation?
• The importance of variation
• The importance of using numbers to help make decisions
• The continuous improvement tools (Quality Tools)
• How to conduct systems audits?
• The important components to successful audits
• Why audits are not always successful?
• The reasons for lack of action on the audit results
• The auditing methods
• The purpose of the systems audit
• The role of policy analyst as systems auditor
• The tools of the auditor
• The audit plan
• The pre-audit and post-audit conferences
• The questionnaire
• Why the auditor may find the "procedure as a checklist" more beneficial than a questionnaire?
• The audit report
• The follow up after improvements

COURSE DURATION:

The typical duration of this course is approximately 2-3 hours to complete. Your enrolment is Valid for 12 Months. Start anytime and study at your own pace.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS:

You must have access to a computer or any mobile device with Adobe Acrobat Reader (free PDF Viewer) installed, to complete this course.

COURSE DELIVERY:

Purchase and download course content.

ASSESSMENT:

A simple 10-question true or false quiz with Unlimited Submission Attempts.

CERTIFICATION:

Upon course completion, you will receive a customised digital “Certificate of Completion”.