There’s a line I keep coming back to when people ask whether AI is a threat to technical writing. Producing text has become cheap. Deciding whether that text is right, whether it’s needed at all, whether it’s in the right place, has not. Those were always different skills. They just
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
There’s always someone arguing the customer journey map can be built in a workshop. Get the right people in a room for a day, sketch the stages, agree the pain points, done. It produces something. It just produces the version the organisation already believes about itself, which is the one
Nobody’s knowledge base has too little content. Every one I’ve inherited has too much, usually by a factor of about 3. Hundreds of articles, several versions of the same procedure, material describing a system that was decommissioned in 2021. The complaint is always that people don’t use it. The diagnosis
Ask 4 people to describe a process they work on daily. You’ll get 4 different answers. The instinct is to treat that as a problem, something to resolve quickly so you can get on with the map. It isn’t a problem. It’s the most valuable thing you’ll find on the
You can teach someone the mechanics of a knowledge base in an afternoon. Spaces, page templates, permissions, a sensible folder structure. Within a few weeks, a capable person can build something that looks organised, professional, ready to fill. That’s the easy 20%. The other 80% is getting the actual content
There’s a familiar moment on transformation projects. The maps are finished. They’re clean, colour-coded, signed off by the steering committee. Everyone agrees the new process makes sense. Then go-live arrives, and someone in the operations team asks a simple question. “Okay, but what do I actually click?” The map can’t
You can teach BPMN 2.0 to a competent graduate in a fortnight. Tasks, gateways, events, pools, lanes. Give them 3 months on a real program, they’ll be modelling processes as well as anyone. The notation was never the scarce skill. What’s scarce is someone who can take a group of
There’s always someone arguing documentation can wait until after go live. The logic is hard to fault in a planning meeting. The system isn’t finished. Screens are still changing. Why write procedures against something that’ll look different in 6 weeks. Then go live arrives, the team moves onto the next
