Knowledge Management as a team sport

When we look at Slite's customer base, there's one thing that our most successful customers have in common: they treat knowledge management as a team sport. Within these companies, a large portion of the team contributes to creating and maintaining knowledge. By doing so, they lift the burden from a single person or department and, at the same time, tap into the collective wisdom of the team.

In every great sports team, each member has their own role and a way to utilize their unique strengths. There are people on offense versus defense, and there are people who are fast versus those who are strong. This is the same with knowledge management. Not every member will have to manage the full knowledge lifecycle. But if you team up and each take a portion, facilitating that full knowledge loop becomes so much easier.

Setting up your knowledge management team

The concept of knowledge management as a team sport is no rocket science, but how do you actually make this happen? In this section, we'll explore some easy and practical ways to foster more collaboration within your knowledge base. We'll discuss strategies for creating content, leaving feedback, and acting upon that feedback.

Creating content

There are 2 different approaches to creating content for your knowledge base:

1. Assign selected writers
2. Everyone writes by default

Some companies have a selected number of people creating content, while others have opened up editing rights to the whole team. There's no right or wrong approach here. Depending on the size of your team, the complexity of the content, and many other factors, you'll find that one approach might work better for you than the other.

The good news? Both strategies can incorporate collaboration just as easily!

Selected writers

In this situation, only a certain number of people in the account have the ability to create content due to their role or permissions. We often see this in large organisations (>1,000 employees) or companies that have a large number of employees in the field.

While not everyone can create new articles from scratch, everyone can still contribute in a more controlled manner. Members with read-only permissions can leave comments, allowing them to provide feedback that the document owner can use for the final or updated version.

Another feature is the "My private channel." Here, members can create new docs and invite a writer via the "Share" menu to collaborate. Once the draft is approved, the writer or admin can move the doc out of the "My private channel" and into the appropriate section of the knowledge base.

While this way of working is generally a bit slower, it is a more controlled way of managing your knowledge base. To make it succeed you will have to have multiple dedicated knowledge managers in place.

Everyone writes

In this scenario, everyone with access to the knowledge base can update and create new content. This is perfect for agile, small, fast-moving teams that do not like to be slowed down by approval flows. The concept is simple: everyone on the team can create and update content directly in the knowledge base.

However, it's important to appoint owners for each channel and formalize guidelines around content creation. Chaos in means chaos out, and that's the last thing you want for your knowledge base.

At Slite, our developers can for example directly update docs in our public Help Center. The Support team is overall responsible for our Help Center channel, but by giving others access to write, we have found the best balance between speed and quality.

Improving documentation

Improving documentation is an area where you want as many people involved as possible. Luckily, with Slite, this is super easy to achieve. Your team can leave actionable feedback on your docs in just 3 seconds. Let's explore!

Flagging incorrect answers

When your team uses Ask and receives an incorrect or incomplete answer, they can manually flag these answers and leave additional details. These reported answers go into "Ask Insights," where, as an admin, you can see exactly what your team has been searching for but has not been able to find in the knowledge base.

Verification

When using Search or just browsing Slite, your team might stumble upon a doc that they are unsure is up to date or contains outdated information. In this case, the user can hover over "Doc verification" at the top of the doc and click "Flag as outdated" or "Request verification." The owner of the doc will receive a notification and actionable feedback to further improve their content.

Addressing the knowledge gap

We already touched upon it with flagging incorrect answers, but the fastest way to make an impact is to add and update content that users are searching for but are not able to find yet. Marking your calendar to do a brief audit of Ask Insights and the Knowledge Management panel every 14 days makes sure you'll stay on top of things without it being too time-consuming or overwhelming.

What you'll notice is that by quickly addressing feedback, people will have more trust in the knowledge base, are more inclined to leave feedback in the future, and will default to the knowledge base as the first place to find answers. And the flywheel takes off!  

Knowledge Management Panel

The Knowledge Management Panel in Slite is the key place to go for understanding the health of your knowledge base. You can slice and dice all your docs and manage them at scale - in one central place. Here you'll be able to find and directly update those docs that your team has flagged as outdated or where they requested verification.

Ask Insights

Ask Insights shows you the reported and missing answers from Ask. Below, you can watch a 55-second demo to get up to speed with this new feature.