communicating. If the information doesn’t make sense, either go back to the source or ask someone else who knows the process well to explain it. Don’t be shy. When you make the effort to find out how the process works and explain it clearly and simply, you are doing everyone else a big favour.
Getting a knowledge base off the ground is a daunting task. (If you’ve already got your knowledge base running you can skip straight to the authoring part.) But as the old saying goes you eat an elephant one bite at a time, and it’s the same with creating your knowledge base.
Here are a few ideas to get things off to a good start.
Nominate a single point of contact for adding new processes to the database
(or changing existing ones) to prevent duplication. Ideally, this should be a role, rather than an individual.
Decide on a meaningful system of category names and issue types. A committee may decide this, or it may be left up to you. Either way, ensure any category or issue names and descriptions are simple and can be understood by anyone in your organisation. These buckets will be used to sort, and potentially analyse, your collective knowledge. (More on that later.)
Create a glossary of commonly used terms and acronyms. They may be obvious to you, but think of the new person.
Sort the existing documentation into workable chunks. A good order to tackle them in is:
1.Fundamental processes and
company information
2.Commonly occurring issues
3.Frequently asked questions
4.Issues of lesser importance
5.Trivial-but-useful
You may want to break it down further into departmental- or system- related information and work your way through one chunk at a time. Some knowledge base systems will import certain document types, while with others you will have to copy, paste and edit as you go.
Here is an example:
It’s unlikely, but if you have to enter reams of hard-copy information into a computerised knowledge base, flag each sorted pile with a coloured Post-it to denote importance. The traffic light system works well – do the red ones first, then orange, then green.