Policies

Policies have a bit of a negative connotation.

Why not try a Service Level Agreement.

What this agreement would say is that your organization will provide this defined level of service, under these conditions. This conditions should include the kinds of software you will support, and the kinds of situations where you will NOT provide suppport.

I have heard of organizations where the first troubleshooting step is to see if the machine is setup to comapny standard. If it isn't, they wipethe disk and set it up to the company standard and see if the problem still exists.

You have to have management buy in at all levels for policies and Service Level Agreements to be effective.

There are docs on this site and others about how towrite a service level agreement.

James Linn

Trish - From your Post I find that your Management Team (MT) is looking for outside reinforcement. That is, your intended policies will be good policies becasue they are already written somewhere else. With this philosophy your Team will ultimately fail.
Your MT is on site. Your MT came up the ranks and did the same abuses and violations that you wish to prevent. Your MT should of had some training in Personnel Management. And in this case, not how to write policy, but rather, how to correctlyenforce policy.
First you already know what you do not want your users to not do. You also know where you should be liberal. You already know what hours are the most open to violations. You already know what stations have the weakest enforcement. Now - write these down. Mix this with your floor or building plan, hours of operation, goals, and restrictions. Also, appoint work area monitors to look right over the shoulder of users on a casual basis. Train these monitors. Above all, learn how totell users, people, how not to do something. You have everything right in front of you. Put it to work.
I came up the ranks from lowly tech to Senior Manangement. There is an art, a craft, to getting people to respond to a channeled enviroment. Youcannot just print it on paper and expect people to follow. They need correct motivation. Also try:

http://www.baltzer.nl/itm/asp

http://www.infotech-usa.com

http://www.pcinformation.com

http://www.cait.wustl.edu

And Good Luck
Try:

Trish - One of the things about a good MT is to stand up and present your policies with bold fortitude. Therefore, I tell you I did not eliminate my "Author" name from my Post on purpose. It came up absent by itself. I am going to TechRepblc now to seek correction.

pjpatiky@hotmail.com 03/09/01. 12:14P

I can let you have one of the policy documents I have produced but outside this forum and neutralised. Policy alone does not stop abuse. It lays down the rules. In teh same stroke, a policy reflects the business and related culture of a company and cannot be generic.
Just confirm if you are interested in the document because I have to do some work to neutralise it.
Ben