Treat administration as a funded service with a backlog, change process and deputy—not an informal extra duty.
The following is a proposed operating cadence. Adjust frequency to your risk, workload and service expectations.
| Cadence | Proposed activity | Accountable role |
|---|---|---|
| Daily or service-appropriate | Review failed jobs, urgent access problems and critical workflow incidents | Platform administrator |
| Weekly | Review unowned records, overdue work, support demand and defect backlog | Product owner and process owners |
| Monthly | Review licence use, data quality, evidence reuse, integration health and configuration changes | Product owner, administrator and IT |
| Quarterly or risk-based | Review privileged access, material design changes and selected portability tests | Security, platform owner and records owner |
| Before each material release | Run relevant regression, permission, integration and AI tests | Administrator and test owners |
| Before renewal decisions | Reassess fit, total cost, retained tools and exit readiness | Sponsor, finance and procurement |
Which measures show whether adoption is real?
Prefer completed business outcomes over login counts. Suggested measures are:
- Tasks completed within the agreed workflow rather than through email workarounds.
- Evidence accepted on first review.
- Records with current owners and valid relationships.
- Actions closed with the required verification.
- Time to produce the agreed management pack.
- Manual reconciliation effort.
- Support requests by cause.
- Administrative effort per recurring process.
Keep the pre-implementation baseline and definitions so comparisons remain meaningful. Review whether reduced effort has actually been redeployed or avoided before describing a financial benefit.
How do you preserve independence while sharing information?
Maintain separate authority over management decisions, testing conclusions and audit work. The IIA’s 2026 podcast on the refreshed Three Lines Model provides an accessible training resource on these distinctions, including assurance, advice and avoiding self-review. (theiia.org)
What should the handover pack contain?
- Approved design and configuration register.
- Role and access matrix.
- Data dictionary and source-to-target mappings.
- Integration runbooks and support ownership.
- Migration reconciliation and archive instructions.
- Regression tests and release procedure.
- Training material and contributor guidance.
- Licence and contract inventory.
- Known defects and prioritised backlog.
- Recovery, incident and escalation procedures.
- Renewal dates and exit evidence.
Exit gate: the operating team accepts the service and demonstrates that it can support a normal cycle and a realistic failure.
Sources cited on this page
- theiia.org ↗www.theiia.org