Workflow and Change Control

Why shouldn't you just tell someone what to do, and they get on and do it? Here's why:

Suppose you have something that requires a change to be made to it. To 'save time' (because of course it's easy!) the change just gets made. But it isn't quite right, things go wrong and lots of effort is required to fix it as well as people being inconvenienced in the meantime. If there is something to refer to and a clear process to follow, mistakes are fewer and less severe, saving you time and money.

Eventually after the change is made correctly, you may need to know who did what. Silver-Owl lets you document all stages of the work, to whatever level of detail you want, If the change affects a system - I.T. related, paper based (eg a set of manuals), or otherwise - you can link each component of the system with each change that is made to it for later analysis, saving you a lot of research in the future.

Project Level

Requests for work are defined as Work Items.  Their implications are assessed and progress recorded through a series of stages defined by the Programme Office as templates.

Each Work Item is requested by a sponsoring project team.

Each item has various fixed pieces of information recorded against it (contacts, requirement, assessment, progress, urgency, estimated cost and timescale etc.). External documents may be attached and additional user-defined data may be added.

Changes may relate to different "Systems" these are collections of related entities, e.g. an IT system, collection of paper forms, series of spreadsheets, etc.

Each system may comprise any number of “Modules” which could be a software program, screen image, documents, a piece of hardware, etc.

Work Items are progressed by the team responsible for it at that stage, then "signed off" and move to the next. An audit trail of sign-offs is maintained.

Work is organised into “Drops” (a.k.a. Versions or Releases) for live use.

An action may optionally be generated to advise somebody to progress the work at the next stage. This is included on the person’s Action List.