Generation Is Cheap Now, Judgement Isn’t
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 used to arrive bundled together, […]
Getting Time With SMEs Who Genuinely Don’t Have Any
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 […]
Leading a Team of Process Analysts Through Customer Journey Work
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 thing a journey map shouldn’t […]
Your Knowledge Base Isn’t Broken, Though Most of It Should Be Deleted
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 is usually that it needs […]
Four People Described the Same Process, All Four Were Right
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 whole engagement. Those differences are […]
Anyone Can Learn Confluence, Getting the Content Out of People Is the Real Job
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 out of engineers, SMEs, business […]
🤝 Process Maps and Work Instructions: Why One Without the Other Falls Over
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 answer that. It was never […]
Anyone Can Learn BPMN 2.0, Not Everyone Can Lead the Team Using It
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 analysts with that same notation, […]
“We’ll Document It After Go Live”
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 release, the documentation never gets […]