What this means for your practice
Make the difference between internal task creation and external communication explicit. Apply the organisation's approval and information-handling process to any outgoing message.
An example to discuss with your team
Trigger a fictional internal follow-up and inspect all resulting actions.
A practical conversation with your supplier
Trigger a fictional internal follow-up and inspect every resulting action, including messages prepared but not yet sent. Confirm recipients, content and approval routes for external communication. Staff should be able to tell whether they are creating work for a colleague or authorising information to leave the organisation.
Plan the first improvement
Draw the workflow as staff experience it: a trigger occurs, an internal task appears, someone reviews it and an external message may follow. Mark where an authorised person makes each decision. This exposes a common misunderstanding in which a button labelled follow up performs more than the user expects. Ask the supplier to show all actions generated by a fictional trigger, including queued drafts and delayed sends. Review recipient selection and message content separately, because correct wording can still go to the wrong destination.
Keep your organisation's information-handling and approval process attached to any external action. Decide how staff cancel a message that is no longer appropriate before dispatch and how they confirm the cancellation worked. Include that scenario in testing. After launch, investigate unexpected communications by tracing the full sequence, rather than looking only at the final template. Clear labels and visible approval states should help staff understand when information will leave the organisation.
How to check the result
Count unintended or incorrectly addressed communication attempts in testing.
Turn reading into a next step
Your action checklist
Work through these checks with your team or supplier. Tick the ones you have resolved and leave unknowns open.
Record what you know, what is still missing and the answer you need from your team or supplier.
Use project decisions only, without personal, patient or confidential details. Entries stay in this page and are not submitted to Kay & Co. Copy or download before leaving; this page does not save your notes.
Further reading
These sources provide background for the topic. The practice examples and checklist are illustrative planning suggestions from Kay & Co.
Related guides
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