ATMS Implementation tips
When we are engaged at an early stage to discuss ATMS requirements we often see the same topics coming up - This document aims to cover some of these to give you a head start in your own ATMS implementation. Of course we don't abandon you through this stage, we're happy to provide support and advice but you will have to make your own decisions about a few key elements.
It's not a 'how to' guide for change management, just a few points specific to ATMS which might be useful
You may never have properly discussed action handling - It's quite common for early ATMS sales meetings to involve a fair bit of discussion around how actions are handled. I think that because ATMS imposes a degree of rigour and structure on actions it forces people to think about something they may not have really considered - of course that's often because they haven't had a dedicated action management system! Anyway, it's usually a good idea to have an in-depth discussion with your team about your process at an early stage.
Key things to get sorted out are:
What kind of actions will you be tracking
E.g. Audit actions, HAZOP actions etc - these will all probably require different data capture approaches. ATMS can support any number of different action types with different supporting data capture forms.
What do you call the various 'roles'
E.g. - The person responsible for completing the action
The person(s) responsible for reviewing the action
Organising actions with Projects – These are just placeholders for groups of actions, you can have as many as you like and you can create 'subprojects' to help organise actions. Getting this structure agreed early will make everything a lot easier
Notifications - when an action is created who do you want to notify? the person responsible for completion will always get an email, but you may want to keep others in the loop - the same applies for the later action stages - for example you may have external stakeholders who need to be notified when an action is closed out, You can then set up the emails for each stage of the action lifecycle using the built-in editor.
Users
Who will access the system, what permissions will they have. Initially it's ok simply to identify the 'System administrators; - they will be critical to the implementation and rollout
Access - how will you manage access to the actions you create. ATMS allows visibility of projects to be controlled by company/user/department and team, so you can have co-existing sets of actions in the same system which are visible to selected groups of users - this is great in multi-stakeholder environments where you may have sub-contractors or partners sharing access to the ATMS system.
ATMS can manage this but it's better to flag it early and contact us for advice
Pick your first users carefully
Start with a small group of users who will not be fazed by the new system - you'll get great feedback and they will become advocates moving forward