Like many companies, ours uses a Liaison/Coordinator structure to implement and perform RM tasks in each department. We are a large organization with 21 functional business groups and around 800 offices -- some with just a few people in a single department and some with a hundred people in many departments. Most of our locations house a single functional group, but some of our functional groups are co-located with other functional groups at the same address. Some offices are truly paperless, while others still use some paper or have legacy paper they are still dealing with. We are rolling out our program trying to make sure that every location is aware of the records management program and has someone assigned to perform the Coordinator role.

I am going bonkers trying to coordinate and make sure that each location is covered. 

Here's our set up:

Each functional group has a Records Liaison (RL). Some groups are small enough, that they only have the Liaison. Most have Department Records Coordinators (DRCs) in each of their locations: sometimes multiple DRCs per location, sometimes one DRC for several locations. Some functional groups are so large, we have intermediate Group Liaisons (GL) between the Records Liaisons and the DRCs. For example, the SW Division covers 15 states. The SW Division has one Records Liaison and a Group Liaison for each state. Under the GLs are the DRCs. Lost yet?

What I am trying to do is create a list that will tell me for every address, what functional group or groups work there, what RL/GLs are responsible for that location and what DRCs are responsible for which departments under each functional group at the location, whether the location is paperless, if any of the departments at that location use offsite storage, what type of offsite storage it is (RM vendor, public storage, office building basement, etc.) and the vendor name or warehouse/storage unit address, and number of cartons stored. Remember that for the DRCs you might have one name per location, multiple names per location or the same name for several locations. 

I also need to track when an office closes or moves or a new one opens. I get a report from Corp Real Estate, which I plug in and then notify the RL that a new office has opened up in their area of responsibility. (I haven't figured out how to get notified when an office closes or moves yet.) We will also be working with HR to get notifications of when an RL, GL or DRC leaves the company or transfers to a new division.

To complicate things, we don't have an official company functional org chart, just a reporting org chart which is kind of funky (Corp IT reports to one of the Division Presidents, for example), so I have to ask the GLs/DRCs to create a name for the group or departments they are responsible for. Also the building codes used by Corporate Real Estate don't always match the building codes used by HR, but that is a glitch and I'm working on getting the two groups to communicate better.

Right now I'm trying to track everything in an Excel spreadsheet and I'm quite sure there is something better. We don't have Access programmers available and I don't know it to be able to build something myself. I feel like I'm totally micro-managing the process right now, but want to back off once the program is in place and running pretty smoothly (will that EVER happen?). 

What program or tools or processes do you use to manage your RM roles?



Nolene Sherman
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Records Manager since 1996. Gone wonky since 1998.

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