You Wouldn’t Ship Code Without Version Control. Your SOPs Have None.
Ask any engineering team how they manage change to their codebase. You’ll get a confident answer. Version control, branches, pull requests, code review, a deployment pipeline, rollback if something breaks. Every change attributable to a person, a date, a reason. Now ask the same organisation how they manage change to their standard operating procedures. The […]
The Real Reason Nobody Deletes Old Documentation
Every knowledge base I’ve inherited has the same problem. Too much content, not too little. Hundreds of articles, several versions of the same procedure, material describing systems decommissioned years ago. Everyone agrees it needs cleaning up. Almost nobody actually does it. The interesting question is why, since the fix is obvious plus nobody’s arguing against […]
Every Knowledge Base Has These People
Spend enough years around documentation work, you start recognising the same characters in every organisation. Different industries, different platforms, same cast. None of them are difficult people. They’re all responding sensibly to incentives nobody designed on purpose. Recognising which one you’re dealing with tends to be more useful than any amount of governance policy. 📦 […]
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 […]