Is there a way to measure knowledge workers time spent on articles?

[Chandra53]

Is there a way to measure knowledge workers' time spent on articles? For example, I have a team that wants to measure how many hours are being worked creating, editing, and reviewing, knowledge articles. 

[Lauren Methena · Accepted solution]

Question for clarity: Does the entire creation process within ServiceNow? For example, we have people write drafts in Word very often. If so, a system outside ServiceNow would be better able to capture all the steps of your process.

[linniesea · Accepted solution]

I had another thought. I used to use one when I was a software developer with multiple contracts. You could trust your writers enough to use a timetracker app, and they can log each activity or just all their work on an article. I found a writeup on one that sounded really good in this article: https://zapier.com/blog/freelance-apps/

[Chandra53]

Thank you for your time responding. The teams that are needing to measure time spent working in knowledge are looking for a way to justify an increase in knowledge worker head-count. We've implemented other ways to track knowledge work, such as creating different tasks for knowledge-related requests from other teams such as adding additional contributors, or editing categories. 

[Lauren Methena]

Not your fault obviously, but as a person who has worked in knowledge, copywriting, and other creative fields, it's so frustrating when higher-ups don't understand how much work actually goes into the creation process. I get having to justify increases in cost, such as hiring more people. I would just like to see workers believed when they say, "Hey, it's taking me X amount of time to create these articles, and now you're asking for more articles, so we need some help here." 

I've just worked in a lot of places where they always want to cut costs and work their creative folks to death. If you need knowledge articles - and they're so successful that you need MORE articles - and people are requesting more (from the readers' side or from the subject matter experts' side), that's a sign of success there. There's your justification.

[helpmepls23]

I agree with linniesea. There are various factors particular to each article whether it is creating, editing, or reviewing the article. complexity, design needs, who is the intended audience, etc.

[Lauren Methena]

For what it's worth, I've found the time stamps in ServiceNow to be very unreliable. They not only aren't always accurate - they can change. For example, we'll have our approvals under the Approval tab for a knowledge article. When certain updates happen, the person who approved gets changed to the name of the admin and the time stamp gets changed to the date when the update happened.

I've also seen when the auto email is sent saying an article will expire in 15 days, the name of the last approver stays the same, but the time stamp of the approval changes to the date and time when that email was sent.

I've also tried to track how much work someone was doing in an article based on the time stamps when an article status changed, but that proved tricky as well, especially since people start and stop while writing.

You'll probably have more success with a system (automated or manual) outside ServiceNow. Just my humble opinion on the matter, based on what we've experienced anecdotally.

I hope this helps! Good luck!

[Lauren Methena · Accepted solution]

Question for clarity: Does the entire creation process within ServiceNow? For example, we have people write drafts in Word very often. If so, a system outside ServiceNow would be better able to capture all the steps of your process.