homework

March 27, 2013

To: Chris Smith

From: Tom Eagle

Subject: Progress on Document Retention and Destruction Project

I have been currently working towards identifying and cleaning out our document storage area. The task is to reduce the amount of documents by at least 25%. Along with destroying our document inventory all remaining documents marked for retention need to be brought up to government compliance.

Logistics prior to starting task

Our document inventory has around 1500 documents, of those 1500 documents about 40% of the documents are out of compliance with government regulations. To accurately identify documents out of compliance I first need to identify which documents are able to be destroyed. To do this, help from program managers and other parties from the technical staff will need to be involved.

Once documents have been reviewed and approved for being destroyed I will bring in an outside contractor such as Data Destruction. This will save the company time and expense with me personally not destroying the documents. The costs will be discussed in the next section. While documents being reviewed are marked for destruction, the documents needing to be retained will be managed and logged into our company database by me.

What has been Completed

With the amount of documents being stored there were numerous programs involved. I have worked with technical staff and program managers and have completed the review of about 90% of the documents. Out of that percentage about 30% have been marked for destruction and have been destroyed.

Bringing in the contractor has been a tremendous help to the organization. The first day she was on site she destroyed over 150 documents and worked six hours to support this project. Bringing her in has saved the company over a $100 and 6 hours of time it would have tied my schedule up.

There have been 200 documents that were marked for retention for future projects and all have been uploaded into our company database. Along with uploading the documents into the database I have brought each of the 200 documents into government compliance.

What still need to be Completed

There are still documents that have not been reviewed and staff has not determined whether some documents can be destroyed or retained. I am continuing to push on this to be completed. One program manager is too busy with current projects of his own and has not had free time to complete his review. Another group of documents that we are in need of a resolution are on hold because of communications between our contracts department and the government.

Once these documents have been decided on, the review portion of this task will be completed. There are still around 300 documents waiting destruction. The contractor has been scheduled for an eight hour shift sometime in the beginning of April to destroy these documents. Once the remaining documents have been assigned destruction or retention I will upload the retained documents into the company database.

Conclusion

The next government audit is not until the fall and I am pretty positive that this task will be completed by then. It is important to me that we stay compliant and I have a personal goal of completing this project before June 2013. The initial task of reducing the inventory by 25% has been surpassed and I am now attempting to reduce the inventory by 50%.