Any knowledge managers out there?
Hi all, my last couple roles have been more knowledge management and information architecture than straight up technical writing.
I'd like to discuss the KM role, share some challenges I've run into, and ask how other KMs are approaching things.
The biggest challenge I run into over and over again is creating team buy-in and socializing the new knowledge systems or best practices I'm introducing. It's super easy to take a couple courses, do some reading, and come up with a list of best practices for KM. The hard part is implementing those practices in real teams and getting people to actually care and participate - even when it would *clearly* improve how their team functions.
Example: So like, I was in a meeting yesterday explaining to the UX people that I was creating onboarding for each specific role/team. I showed them their new UX onboarding page in our company's KB and told them (nicely) they needed to own the page and contribute things to it there so it's in a central location and we can see what's being updated (they had been passing around a random word doc of random links). Their reaction was silence basically, or seeming not to understand. This makes me think I need to just assign one owner to their onboarding page and meet with that person specifically to go over the details and guide them to help them manage it for their team. But who am I to assign ownership like that? I'm not their manager or something. But when I don't just straight up assign ownership, it seems like everyone just shrugs it off and never does anything.
So how would you go about this? How do you integrate knowledge systems into teams who already have a status quo, and where you're just the "new technical writer". Discuss with leadership, and get leadership to implement? Straight up assign ownership of resources? Spam reminders and emails?
And then also, how do you integrate documentation into development processes and Agile sprints? Or rather, how do you enforce it? As in, making sure people are documenting project notes publicly, release notes, updating old docs in the KB. We have an issue with people just passing around links to different word docs, excel sheets, SharePoint stuff, Claude skills, with no central organisation. Everyone agrees it's extremely confusing and siloed and they don't know what's going on, but when I try to implement knowledge management systems they often fall flat. I'm starting to think I need to collaborate with leadership more and convince them of what we need and then let leadership handle the enforcing part.
Or does anyone have good examples of systems that integrate well into teams that are easy to keep going once they're in place? I know "systems" is broad, but they could be related to anything - onboarding, releases, project notes, audits. Looking forward to discussing!