How many times have you received a support call about “That system” that never seems to make sense to anyone except for the one person who originally put it in. When that call comes in, we would pop our heads over the partition to that one person and ask them to take the call or how exactly do we go about fixing this thing….
Too often is my guess.
Well what happens when our cubical partitions are replaced by our homes and the option to just “Pop our head over” is no longer a reality?
Many support organisations are moving to tools such as Skype, Teams, Zoom etc. to stay connected, but what happens when traditional working hours no longer apply?
When the workforce shifts to getting up early to “get a few solid hours in” before home schooling the kids for the day before returning to finish their working day when the kids and family are asleep?
What if the one support person is not online? Is taking another call or just not responding? Or worse….
This is the realisation that many support organisations are having to tackle right now and the cost of having knowledge tied up in one person is a cost we as an industry can no longer afford.
Knowledge management has never been a high priority for organisations as the cost of maintaining a knowledge management system seemed excessive compared to popping heads over partitions like a pack of prairie dogs looking for danger. Now the cost of not having an up-to-date knowledge management system is becoming clear.
Clearly documenting systems, common issues and common resolutions is very valuable in this new world of shifting workforce to remote locations. Not only to minimise risk to the organisation for having large swathes of knowledge tied up in one or two key employees, but also to allow end users to be able to self-service their own issues when the support team is not available to ask directly.
It is time to take knowledge management seriously and treat it with the mission critical status that it deserves.
Here are a few tips that I believe are key to successfully creating, managing and maintaining a good knowledge management system.
Integration
There is no point in having good documentation is no one can find it when they need it.
Having a system that integrates with all of your current service management system but also is available to end users via a web portal etc. is critical to any knowledge management solutions success.
Most service management solutions will some level of knowledge management solution that integrates with their solution. Being able to tag useful articles against incidents as they are resolved will ensure other staff having similar issues will be able to leverage someone else’s experience to shorten their support effort.
Just make sure it is available externally and can be easily exported if needed.
Templates
Consistency of format, layout and level of technical language are important to articles being used by support staff and end users alike.
If an article is too full of jargon or is too wordy, end users will get lost and not be able to find the specific answers they are after. If an article attempts to contain too much information in a single document then support staff will spend more time trying to find the relevant section for it to save them any time and effort.
Perfection is the Enemy of Good Enough
While templates and consistency of format are important, they are not as important as the raw information. Many knowledge management projects I have seen have failed due to the amount of content just not being available. This is usually because the level of detail that project leaders are wanting makes for slow and complicated editing processes. It is far better to get the raw data published an available ASAP and then return later to “Pretty it up” than it is to have it perfect first time.
Change Management
One of the largest challenges I have seen with any knowledge management project has been keeping the content up to date. This usually comes down to a single point of failure and that is not including documentation review in the change management process.
When a system gets implemented and change management is scheduled for build, test or even rollout, knowledge management should be across all segments of the change to ensure as much documentation is available day one of the system going live.
When a system gets changed or updated, the knowledge documentation should be re-visited to ensure it is still valid, screen shots are relative and representative of the new system, and any new features should be added to the existing knowledge documents.
There is no better time that the present to start you knowledge management journey as it will only help in our industries shift to remote working. Now get writing….
