I find myself frequently saying the words, “I don’t recommend using the Available for Checkout stage as a part of your process” – and I have a lot of good reasons.  Available for Checkout essentially means this: a page in policyIQ is not published, but it is also not currently sitting in someone’s queue to be worked on.  You can see how easily these pages might be overlooked and forgotten.  If the responsibility isn’t spelled out, it’s easy to assume that someone else will take care of it.

And then a funny thing happened.  A few months ago, I found myself specifically recommending the Available for Checkout stage for one of our policyIQ users – for exactly the reasons that I would normally avoid it.

The client uses policyIQ to manage their Sarbanes-Oxley documentation, with multiple business units and locations.  Some processes in certain business units are not in scope – but the risk assessments and controls are retained, and test pages are even created each year.  For those units not in scope, the information is simply left in a Draft state so that it is available should a situation occur to change the scope.

The audit team, however, actively uses their Checked Out to Me queue to manage their workload – and several hundred pages of not-in-scope Risks, Controls and Tests really gum up the works.

We considered some options.  They could simply publish the pages, but they need to be sure that their final audit reports, made available to external auditors within policyIQ, do not include these out of scope pages.  View security could accomplish this, but then every auditor would need to remember to update the View security if an item were to be changed to in scope (or to remove security if something were discovered to be out of scope).

Ultimately the right – and simple – answer was to pull all of those pages into Available for Checkout and keep them out of the queue for active work.

After this experience, I find myself rephrasing my previous words to be more clear.  “Typically, we don’t recommend using Available for Checkout as a part of your active workflow, because pages may be lost or forgotten.”