Retention schedules, why should you care?

Picture the scene, you have completed the process of classifying your information, data and documents and know what you want to retain and/or know what you need to retain within your Preservation project.

Now is the time to create a Retention Policy and as part of your policy a retention schedule. Although they are often seen as an administrative requirement and a regulated process step I actually believe they are documents and initiatives with a huge amount of business value. 

Owning, managing and maintaining a defined retention schedule is a critical step to deliver your project, it is the blueprint for your software solution meeting your business needs with a foot in both the compliance and storage camps. It also supports and underpins the deletion step that is often the most uncomfortable one to take. So, your well structured schedule will ensure correct corporate governance by implementing the retention periods dictated to us but it also delivers efficiency in our document management operations. It allows pre-approved and agreed retention rules to be applied to groups of content and ensures objects are deleted when applicable.

And remember, we are only applying the retention schedule to content that we have deemed as valuable to our organisation.

To create a retention schedule from scratch I would suggest you only need to start with the following six areas that will be based on your requirements, your adaptation of regulation and your own structure.

• Object name

Most often this will be documents but can be data sets or ‘other’ objects

• Type

You will have different groupings of content often related to Product, projects, finance, HR etc etc. There is no limit to the number of different types of content but to make the schedule deliver efficiency I would encourage a limited number of content types

• Media & location

Explain the way the object is being stored and if required the location. As much as we try to live in a digital world you will almost certainly have some paper records (contracts for example) so ensure paper records have their location included in the schedule.

Where objects are stored electronically, add the preservation file format. 

• Retention period

The period is how long you will hold the record for and importantly from what date this hold starts. Examples are; in the UK, HMRC related records need to be held for 6 years +1. For our Life Science clients, any Clinical trial up to 15 years but with variations on this and GDPR will have various retention periods which are reliant on the your own classifications.

• Based on what authority

Detailing the reason, authority and standard is very useful. If a standard changes it enables you to immediately see which records are affected by this change. Where the retention is driven by an internal factor it equally will allow easy sort, search and retrieval  

• Action

Why do we retain? Because there is value in our data so do not automatically set the action to deletion. Some records we DO want to delete once the retention period expires but some we may want to review. The review may result in a controlled and evidenced deletion but it may result in an extended or new period of retention so be clear what needs to happen at the end of your initial period of hold.

And don’t allow the building of a retention policy and schedule to become a grand affair. Both the Policy and the schedule will be controlled documents so you can add to it over time using version control. But once in place it is a powerful governance tool that allows best practice to be executed by trained team members and in doing so will deliver efficiency to your preservation projects.