Knowledge article template variations - what are you experiences?

[Magnus Hovik]

Sorry about the long read!

Note: I'm mostly curious to hear thoughts and experiences from your organisation — don't get too hung up on the specifics of our setup! 🙂

(And hopefully don't just answer that we need better content approval)

We're evaluating whether to expand beyond a single KCS template. Some context:

• Large organisation, multiple departments (IT, HR, Marketing, Finance, etc.)
• Early KCS adoption — CoE, knowledge coaches, delegated contributors, no content approval team
• Current single template (Title – Description – Resolution) feels IT-centric, losing non-IT contributors
• A "Standard" template sits alongside it — non-IT newcomers tend to default to it instinctively
• Knowledge flows both reactively and proactively — not all knowledge is demand-driven
• We are going to test variations internally based on lots of existing knowledge and tickets from different departments.

We're considering adding: 

• Problem & Solution
• Question & Answer
• How To

But I'm concerned about overlap and decision fatigue, especially without a content team to catch inconsistencies. Here's the problem illustrated. The same topic, three valid templates:

IT example — "Reset my password"

• Q&A:
  • Question: How do I reset my password?
  • Answer: Go to the login page and click "Forgot password"
• How To:
  • Introduction: This guide explains how to reset your password
  • Instructions: Step 1, Step 2...
• Problem & Solution:
  • Problem: User cannot log in due to forgotten password
  • Solution: Navigate to...

HR example — "Missing paycheck"

• Q&A:
  • Question: Why haven't I received my paycheck?
  • Answer: Contact payroll at X with your employee ID
• How To:
  • Introduction: This guide explains what to do if your paycheck is missing
  • Instructions: Step 1, Step 2...
• Problem & Solution:
  • Problem: Employee has not received expected paycheck
  • Solution: Navigate to the payroll portal...

A contributor sitting down to write either of these has to make a judgment call. And in a large, (mostly) self-regulated program, three people could write the same article three different ways. Good content standards help — but realistically, people won't consult them every time.

This gets even more interesting for proactive knowledge. Organisational content that isn't tied to a specific incident or request. That content often doesn't fit neatly into any of these templates either?

I know KCS leans toward a single template, and I understand the reasoning. We've tried it, it's not landing across our departments, and I don't think more training alone will fix it.

What are your experiences? Or thoughts?

Thank you!

[theRadioMic]

Okay, so colour me curious to find out what you mean by "the specifics of our setup" is. Are you speaking organisationally or structurally ( in SNow)?

Regardless, it seems the issue you have laid out is a matter of content oversight and there isn't a template that will fix that. There are a few things to be parsed out in order to reduce content duplication.

1. Do the departments, groups, sections or teams contribute knowledge content to the same Knowledge Base ( KB )?
   • If yes, does each department, group, section or team have representation by way of a Knowledge Manager ( KM ) in the KB?
     • If yes, then the issue is easily resolved by updating the approval workflow process for each KM to review and approve the content. This means that duplicated content would be caught and addressed ( through training on how to best consolidate the content through organisational preference ).

   ---

   • If no ( some organisations have multiple KBs accessible by the Employee Center ), create a report to review the content in each of the KBs for duplicative or similar content on the KM dashboard that could be reviewed by the Knowledge Admin. The KA can address the duplicative content found with each of the KB KMs.

May not be the response you were looking for as this is merely a quick thought about how I would look at correcting an issue of regularly occurring duplicative content.

[David Kay]

Most of our clients (all of whom are doing or implementing KCS) go with some variation of the three article types you list.  The most common variation is to combine How To and Q&A, since, if you squint a little, a How To is just a specific type of question and answer.

There's great diversity in what our clients call the individual fields: Symptoms / Issue / Problem / What's Not Working or Environment / Applies To or Resolution / Steps / How to Fix It...  This is largely based on the customers they serve and their brand voice.  (Also, Environment means something very specific for some of our clients, so it's not suitable for that field.)

We do recommend that our clients not use just the Solution template, because both the field labels and the Cause field don't make much sense in How To or Q&A use cases.

Re: "KCS leans toward a single template," that was somewhat true in the past, but less so today, and I expect we're clarifying that in the upcoming version of the Practices Guide.  The former executive director and I talked about this at length and agreed that sure, it's a single template, but the labels can change and fields can be suppressed in some articles.  My personal take is that the erstwhile one-template partisans were heavily influenced by the long-ago KB Primus, which was architected around a single solution template.

[Andy Guerriero]

In my experience creating multiple custom knowledge temples has been damaging.

1. Users encountering different templates in different functional areas or knowledge bases creates an undesirable divergance in common UX.
2. LLMs have trouble consuming varied templates vs a standardized template.
3. If you use a bot to generate knowledge articles, the bot requires a lot more customization to accommodate different templates.