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]

It varies, though when I train new knowledge workers, I encourage creating inside the tool. 

[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]

It's not a matter of trust for us, but I understand what you're saying here. We are wanting a solution inside the tool. As ITIL workers, we are already tracking time spent in projects and knowledge is one of those. We're just wanting to measure on a deeper level inside the tools. 

[Erik24 · Accepted solution]

In our case we want to measure time spent creating and updating articles to better visualize and promote the work that Knowledge Managers are doing, since it is a critical success factor and often gets forgotten or down-prioritized. It is not to make them compete or be faster.

We use KFTs and we also got the Time Worked and KFT Metrics configured, only issue is that KFTs time stamps gets mixed if multiple KFTs are submitted from the same Case record.

Other than that we use a catalog item for requesting/submitting knowledge update requests.

We usually work in Word with simple templates and copy/paste into the editor (tried the Word add-in but it was too buggy).

Interesting to read thoughts and practices on the matter!

[Chandra53]

Thank You Erik! This is the situation I'm in and after I visit with our Principal Engineer tomorrow and pick his brain about it, we're going to come up with a fuller way of measuring work for our knowledge workers. In my company, there's literally only 2 job-titled knowledge workers and I'm trying to change that. There's so much work that's being done that's unmeasured it's impossible to justify head count without data. 

I'll reply here and let you know what we decide on. I've also been having the engineers create intake forms for me from our portal when someone needs some work done, but I think it can be more robust. Then we can move that into tasks and set SLAs. But, there may be an option I'm not aware of, we shall see! 

I appreciate everyone's responses and feedback and from what I'm reading here, there's ways to measure, but it's not as simple as I would like it to be. 🙂 And that answers my question, so thank you!