Every knowledge base project runs into the same wall eventually.
The person who knows the most has 40 meetings a week, an incident to manage, plus 3 other projects asking for their time.
Your request sits in their inbox, unread, for a fortnight.
This isn’t a motivation problem on their end.
It’s a design problem on yours.
Most requests for SME time are built for someone with a spare hour.
Almost nobody has a spare hour, so the request needs to work without one.
⏱️ Shrink the ask before you send it
The biggest lever is size.
A request for 60 minutes gets deprioritised behind everything else that week.
A request for 15 minutes gets slotted between meetings.
- Ask for 15 minutes, not an hour
- Say up front exactly what it’s for
- Name the specific thing you need, not “a chat about the process”
- Suggest 3 concrete time slots, rather than asking them to find one
That last point removes a whole step of back-and-forth.
Most delays happen in the scheduling, not the actual conversation.
📝 Never ask someone to start from nothing
Asking an SME to explain a process from scratch is the single heaviest thing you can put in front of them.
It requires structuring their own knowledge, remembering the exceptions, then articulating all of it clearly.
That’s real cognitive work, which is exactly why it gets avoided.
Correcting something is a fraction of the effort.
- Build a draft first, from old documents, system screens, whatever exists
- Send it ahead of the session, so they can glance at it beforehand
- Ask them to mark up what’s wrong, rather than describe what’s right
- Frame the meeting as “check my understanding”, not “explain this to me”
Ten minutes correcting a rough draft gets you further than 45 minutes of open-ended explanation, plus it feels like a smaller ask to the person granting it.
🎯 Ask specific questions, not general ones
“Can you walk me through the process” invites a long, unstructured answer that takes effort to produce plus effort to use.
Specific questions are quicker to answer plus quicker to write up.
- “Does the approval happen before or after the credit check?”
- “What happens if the usual approver is on leave?”
- “Which field is mandatory that people usually skip?”
- “What’s the most common reason this gets rejected?”
Prepare 3 or 4 of these before the session, then let the conversation wander from there if it wants to.
Specific questions also signal you’ve done homework, which changes how the person responds.
You’re asking them to correct you, not educate you.
📅 Book it, don’t request it
An email asking “when are you free” generates more email.
A calendar invite with a clear subject line generates a yes or a reschedule, both of which move things forward.
- Send the invite directly, with an agenda in the description
- Keep it to 15 or 20 minutes
- Offer to come to their desk instead of a meeting room
- Attach the draft to the invite itself, so it’s impossible to miss
Booking rather than asking removes an entire round of negotiation.
🙅 Make it easy to say no
This sounds counterproductive, though it consistently works.
People avoid responding to requests they feel obligated to accept.
Give them a way to decline something small, then they engage far more readily.
- “Would it be a problem if I published the draft as it is?”
- “Is this a bad time, should I come back next month?”
- “If I don’t hear from you by Thursday, I’ll go with what I’ve got”
Saying no to a rough draft going live is easy, low effort, almost automatic.
The correction usually arrives attached to that no, which is exactly what you needed.
🤝 Bank goodwill before you need it
The SMEs who respond fastest are the ones who already trust you.
That trust gets built outside the requests themselves.
- Send them the finished article once it’s published
- Credit them by name, where appropriate
- Thank them somewhere visible, like a team channel
- Answer a small question outside your scope, when it costs you 5 minutes
None of that is transactional in the moment, though it changes how quickly the next request gets answered.
🧑🤝🧑 Widen who counts as an SME
The person named on the project plan isn’t always the fastest route to the information.
- The team leader may know less day to day than a senior team member
- A new starter often remembers exactly what confused them, which is valuable
- Someone covering for the usual expert may explain it more simply, since they’re still learning it themselves
Spreading requests across a few people also reduces the load on any single person, which makes each individual ask smaller plus easier to grant.
✅ The short version
None of these strategies are complicated.
They just require designing the ask around a busy person’s actual week, rather than an ideal one that doesn’t exist.
Small requests, drafts to correct, specific questions, bookings instead of open invitations, an easy way to say no.
Do all of that consistently, then SME time stops being the bottleneck it usually is.
About the author
Aiver Ilaya is an IT consultant based in Melbourne. For 19 years he’s worked on enterprise digital transformation programs. His experience spans ITSM, HRIS, ERP, CRM, POS, KMS and EDRMS platforms, plus workflow automation. He has worked across government, healthcare, science and medical research, finance, education, telecommunications, infrastructure, aviation, construction and property, technology, retail, logistics, pharmacy, insurance and professional services.
His work covers business analysis, process optimisation, technical writing, knowledge management and UI / UX design. He has worked on multi-million dollar programs running years at a time, for national organisations and global firms, reaching millions of end users.
He has run his own consultancy for 12 years and works with a small number of clients at a time. Available for remote and hybrid contracts.
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