Step One - preliminary investigation

You are strongly advised to ensure that you conduct a preliminary investigation.

You are referred to the DIRKS Manual, Step A - Preliminary investigation - for a detailed account of how to conduct a preliminary investigation...

The four key steps that comprise a preliminary investigation are:

• Determine the scope of the preliminary investigation

• Collect information from documentary sources and interviews

• Document your research

• Prepare a report for senior management

You need to balance the work you do in step one against the work planned in step four - the detailed survey of your education organisation's existing record keeping systems.

At the end of the preliminary investigation you should have gained and documented:

• a clear understanding of your education organisation and 'the administrative, legal, business and social context in which it operates. This should include a structured review of the organisational structure which can help to scope the resources required to conduct steps two, three and four. For an EDRM procurement it is very helpful to record not just the logical organisational structure of the education organisation but also the physical location of each faculty, administration department etc. This will help in stages four and six when you need to document the current IT infrastructure including the networking;

• a general appreciation of your education organisation's current record keeping strengths and weaknesses including the need for electronic document and records management and business process management and the benefits it could bring in each area;

• the information you need to feed into your project definition and project planning documents as defined in stage two - including the PID and the business case and the project plan. You will have a much clearer idea after you have completed step one of the resources required to conduct steps two to four.

Hence one dependency is that you should have completed this step one before you complete the PID for the EDRM solution project.

As part of a formal records management project, step one is an essential first step on the road to preparing a functions based business classification scheme as part of step two and a functions based records disposal scheme as part of steps two and three