How Do I Boost the Importance of Knowledge

[DavidReynolds]

I'm frustrated. I am the only dedicated knowledge writer in a global company with 12,000 employees. Most of my day now is spent updating existing articles. My issue is that these particular articles must be reviewed and approved by one of two managers, both of whom are swamped with other tasks.

Currently, more than 200 of 1,100 articles are waiting for review. About 80 have been in Review for more than 30 days.

The bottleneck is not on my production end but on the approval side: there aren't enough people who have the time to approve them.

Because of this bottleneck, articles are expiring. People are getting links to articles that as far they know, don't exist.

At the same time, our tech support team is down two agents and has been for a month.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what I can suggest or do to break the bottleneck?

Thank-you.

>>Dave Reynolds, Technical Support Technical Writer

[Pam Calvey]

See if management can assign additional approvers. In the meantime, sort your pending approvals by most viewed/used and concentrate on getting those pushed through first. Best wishes, I hope you can get some buy-in from management to support the knowledge process.  

[Eoghan Sinnott]

Hi Dave,

I’d be interested in understanding what the reviewer experience looks like today. How are the two managers notified when an article is ready for review? Are they primarily receiving ServiceNow notification emails, or do they have a dashboard/work queue showing everything waiting for them, how long it has been there, and which articles are approaching expiry? If it is mainly email-based, I wonder whether notification overload is part of the problem. 

I would also look at if there are escalations at any points, for example when something has been waiting 7, 14 or 30 days. High-use articles, critical documents, articles with a high link rate to incidents/cases, and content approaching expiry should probably be much more visible than a minor update to a low-use article.

From experience you could be looking at two different problems here.

1 - the managers can see the work but genuinely don’t have the capacity to complete it

2 - the review work isn’t being surfaced and prioritised effectively. 

Adding more approvers could solve the first problem, but not the second.

If capacity is the issue, I’d question whether every change genuinely requires one of those two managers to approve it. A minor correction or routine maintenance update probably doesn’t need the same governance as a new article or a material technical change.  If an otherwise valid article becomes expired because an approval is late, the governance process could be creating additional risk. Depending on the content, look at if it has been viewed/attached to incidents or cases recently, and follow the KCS principle of reuse is review.

I’d also make the backlog visible to leadership. Track the number awaiting review, median/average time in Review, articles approaching expiry, articles that actually expire while waiting for approval, and ideally usage or impact. 

If the support team is already down two agents, it's important to stress the importance of having reviewed and up to date knowledge available to the team.If those articles support the services their teams handle, up to date knowledge should mean fewer avoidable tickets and escalations reaching their queues, and less time spent repeatedly answering issues that could have been resolved through reliable self-service or by support teams using articles that should be available to them. So time spent reviewing knowledge can ultimately give some of that time back to the reviewer and their team.

Hopefully this might be of some use to you, and hope you get the support needed.

Regards,

Eoghan

[drosenst2]

We are looking into using Claude as an approver next year. We will feed it our style guide & article approval checklist and then it can approve/reject after that. It will probably be a suggestion to the human at first while showing suggested changes. 

May I ask why other people are not writing articles? In my experience, knowledge management systems that are centralized around the KM team are way harder to manage.  KM people are not the SMEs and really should be looking at formatting, grammar, etc. I'd recommend moving to a semi decentralized system if possible in the short term. Are templates being used?

[JulietChicago]

Hi,

Yes this is frustrating.

If the approvers are unable to approve can a check list be created that if some of the articles meet the checklist are approved by you or automatically so that can get the articles moving. Or would it be possible to publish the article but have a note like not verified yet to drain the bottle neck.

Can only the really high value articles require approval and the others be directly published?

These are only suggestions. 

I do hope you get more support.