How do I Retire Outdated Policies? - Legacy Interface

Objective

How to retire outdated policies in the Legacy Interface.

Environment

PolicyStat Legacy Interface

Procedure

Looking for these steps in the New PolicyStat Interface? See (How do I retire outdated policies? )

If a policy is no longer needed, it can be retired and removed from the general view by the policy's Owner, Area Manager, or Site Administrator.

1. Open a policy to be retired.
2. Locate the retire option in the blue bar at the top right.
   • If this link is not visible, the Site Administrator may have removed the ability to retire or the account being used may not have appropriate permissions to retire. Policies that have pending versions are not able to be retired until the pending version completes the workflow, or the pending version is deleted.
3. After clicking the Retire link, a prompt will ask for a summary of changes. In other words, describe the rationale for retiring this policy (1).
   
   • When retiring, if a draft version exists it will be deleted permanently.  A warning will appear if a draft version exists when the retire button is clicked.
4. When completed with the summary of changes, click the Retire Policy button (2).

Additional Information:

To remove an outdated or no longer required active policy from public view, PolicyStat provides three options: Restrict Visibility, Retire, or Delete.

1. Restrict: Removes a policy from the ability to be viewed by general users, users with elevated privileges can still see it. For more on restricting visibility, see the article here .
2. Retire: Remove the policy from the system, but it can be returned to the system at a later time if it is found to be necessary. Only Site Administrators may reinstate a retired policy .
3. Delete: Remove the policy from the system entirely. This action is not reversible, and the policy is permanently removed. Only Site Administrators may delete a policy from the site. For more on this process, see this article .

As a part of the Approval Workflow process, when a new version of a policy completes the approval process, the previous version moves to an archive.

In some instances, it may be preferable for an Owner to retire the previous policy rather than update it.

Please note that this option may not be available for all sites, as Site Administrators can also remove this function for Owners. For more on that process, see this article: How Do I Remove the Retire Button for Owners and Managers?

• The option to retire is ONLY available for active approved documents.  Pending and draft documents must go through an approval workflow and be made active to be able to be retired.
• Retiring a policy is not reversible, a new version of the policy can be created and approved and the version history will be retained.  For more information, see this article: Can I make an Accidentally Retired Policy Active again?
• Once a policy is retired, only Site Administrators can view it under the Admin tab.
• If any users were assigned to acknowledge the policy, they will no longer see it under Policies Awaiting Acknowledgment list after it is retired. 

IMPORTANT:  When retiring a document be sure to review the contents to see if there are documents linking to it since those links will need to be updated.  Download the Hyperlinks Report under the Admin Console (site administrator's only) and then search in the spreadsheet for the PolicyStat ID of the document being retired to identify the documents where the link exists throughout the other documents.  Update their links via Override. Be sure to search it for the past version IDs of a document as well since each new active version has a unique PolicyStat ID number.