Quality in knowledge article creation

[RogueFader]

Hi. I was wondering what others do in regards to ensuring compliance from knowledge authors in regards to the quality of their articles they create.

Currently, we do have a guideline that font is a particular type and size, description is clear and easy to read, meta is added to help with searching for knowledge etc....

It seems that KBs come in for approval daily, where the font has been amended to their own personal preference and size. URLs are broken, attachments not included, meta missed etc etc....

Despite the fact we actually have a KB and sharepoint page which details how to create a KB, and this has been communicated and shared via Teams and training calls, it seems people don't want to read a KB on how to create a KB.

I've started to look at AQI, but to me this seems rather labour intensive on myside as it means I review all KBs after they've been published, I would like it if AQI was in place when knowledge was created so authors would be forced to check the content prior to publishing.

Is this something others have an issue with and how do you address is across the org consisting of multiple teams globally to ensure they follow guidelines.

Rant over..I need a tea.

Thank you

[RogueFader]

Hi, so when a team creates a KB, it goes from draft to review with that group, it's usually then it hits my queue where I do the checks to make sure it's fit for purpose, it ticks all the boxes before my 2nd stage approval prior to publishing. With the set up at your workplace, how does it work with having multiple ownership groups who publish and maintain? Do they create and publish the articles themselves without your input as process owner?

[Juhi Yasmin]

That is correct. Here's what our setup looks like for our HRSD module:

• Global Processes are owned by CoEs and each CoE has an ownership group. Each group comprises of 2 or max 3 members who we refer to as Knowledge Coordinator. So while the owner of the content could be anyone in the CoE, the knowledge articles are always created by the knowledge coordinators. When knowledge coordinators create an article, they are required to indicate in the article who is the Content Author(basically who is the content coming from).
• Local Processes are owned by the Local HR Service Delivery teams. So each country has a Ownership Group which consists of 2-3 knowledge coordinators who have the rights to publish articles. The content for articles could come from the HRSD team who manages HR cases and identify the need to have a knowledge article or the HRBPs who might have frequently asked question from employees that could be potentially a knowledge article or they themselves documenting their local benefits/payroll/leave of absence related articles. In this case as well, the knowledge coordinator is required to maintain the Content Author field in the knowledge article with who provided the original content for the article.
• Each ownership group, local or global has a manager. We train knowledge coordinators twice a year to ensure understand and are fully aware of the best practices to create knowledge articles. And keeping the task limited to them helps us control quality of the content.

[andreababch]

Juhi - we are working toward having a Technical Writer also help with articles before hand because of all the same reasons. I am just wondering for your process, how are you putting these notes in the article? Did you customize a field for this or do you mean manually changing the Author field? We just added a revision notes field because it was getting challenging to know exactly what changed and exactly where content came from.

[Juhi Yasmin]

Good question. So authors of the article(in our case knowledge coordinators) are required to populate the Content Author field(which is different from the author). The Content Author helps us identify who owns the content provided in the knowledge article. Then we have defined a process of knowledge article creation and update requests. We have created a dedicated service to allow our users to request for either creation of a new knowledge article or update an existing article. When they make the request, they are required to provide the content for it which is reviewed by knowledge coordinators if it is a request for a new article or content author if it is a request for updating an existing article. This was done to standardize the intake of such request, have visibility on the volume of work by done by knowledge coordinators and ensure requests for modifications and creation are traceable. This helps us identify why and what was changed. We introduced this very recently. Hope this answers your question and I understood your challenge correctly.

[andreababch]

Yes, this helped. Thank you. Is that Content Author field custom though? We don't have that available, only Author.