Effective planning for and implementation of records retention and disposal programs will ultimately save your organisation money in storage and other management costs as well as supporting compliant records disposal practices and activities. Management of records retention and disposal is assessed in the Records Management Assessment Tool (see Q17).

Assess your systems' capacities to implement disposal

An initial assessment of your systems' capacities to administer retention and disposal decisions in a manner that is appropriate to your operational needs and business requirements will assist in planning for and the implementation of records disposal processes and activities. Consider:

• Can the retention and disposal authorities be loaded into business systems or  records management software?
• Can retention requirements be automatically applied to records when they are created or received as part of business processes? If not, what will be required to facilitate this?
• Are systems capable of calculating disposal due dates from relevant triggers? If not, what will be required to facilitate this?
• What business rules are in place to govern the management of records in database or specific business system environments? Do these need to be developed or modified to better support compliant disposal of records from these systems?
• What system generated reports are required to support the management and documentation of disposal activities and approval processes?

See also Step D of Strategies for Documenting Government Business for guidance on undertaking systems assessment.

If your current systems cannot provide the functionality you require to manage retention and disposal activities, you can use the methodology outlined in Step E and Step F of the Strategies for Documenting Government Business to develop improvements in your system. You may also follow these steps to develop policies and procedures to guide implementation of compliant records disposal practices.

Develop policies, procedures and user training

All staff in the organisation, including contractors, need to be made aware that the disposal of records is an accountable process.

Organisations should develop and document accountable and authorised processes for the management of records retention and disposal activities. Policies and procedures should clearly articulate roles and responsibilities with respect to the destruction of records and the transfer of State archives to archival custody or control.

As part of your implementation strategy you may choose to develop a training package to assist staff in understanding the organisation’s records retention and disposal requirements and their responsibilities with respect to the management of these processes.