Documents an employee uses in his daily business are often spread on various systems and are saved in different document types like Word, Excel or PDF files, while still many other notes are scattered on post-it notes, notepads or are still laying in the email inbox. Additionally, the complexity in finding the right information increases due to the number of documents saved by teammates in the same manner which results in loss of information and duplications.
Gather all information in one place.
One way to harmonize the overloads of information is the implementation of Confluence, a workspace to ensure knowledge management in and across teams. In one centralized place the creation, the collaboration and the organization of documents are ensured. However, the success of a Confluence knowledge base depends on pre-defined rules and the right setup.
Our ATLASSIAN experts at Lupus Consulting gathered important advice to set up governance rules for sustainable knowledge management in Confluence:
- Structure
Confluence provides different ways to organize and structure content. Create a high-level structure and discuss the layout of your wiki tool in a small team. Also keep in mind the different options to structure:
- Spaces enable to group content according to major categories (e.g. Customers, Products, etc).
- Pages are used for less relevant topics and can be structured into page trees to show the relation between them.
- Favorites are particular pages or spaces that have been bookmarked by a user for quick access.
- Labels are user-defined tags that are added to related pages in order to categorize them in some way. Check existing labels before defining new ones. Also don´t allow the end-user to create new labels since there will be duplicates (e.g. MS Office or Microsoft Office).
- Attachments to a page include images, multimedia, excel, word and PDF files.
- The sidebar is a good place to display important links for your team or project.
- Select relevant topics for your knowledge base
The capacity of the IT-Team is limited, so they cannot write an article for every single support issue. Prioritize the top 5 to 10 issues first and upload additional content step by step. The connection with a Ticketing System (e.g. Jira Service Management) enables a great overview of incoming tickets which can be transformed into a knowledge base article.
- Work with standardized templates
Many technical experts struggle to write articles for end-users from a customer-orientated perspective. Template helps them to write an article for everyone and include important aspects, which is obvious for a technician. Templates also ensure consistency in the created content and increase user awareness.
- Ensure articles are accessible and easy to read
Keep in mind: not everyone has the same expertise as the developer, product manager or others. In many cases, the readers don´t have a technical background. Explanation, descriptions, or phrases that might seem simple could be confusing to the readers.
Images, GIFs or videos help to visualize the descriptions in the article and help to get a better understanding.
- Work with feedbacks
Actively ask for feedback from readers to analyze if your articles are helpful. The easiest way to get that feedback is by using the like button.
- Ensure easy navigation
Nobody likes digging around for answers, especially not when they’re having a technical issue. Before designing a knowledge base layout, create a draft with layers that can be easily managed by the employees.
These three tipps guarantee easy navigation in the knowledge base.
- Add a search bar
- Highlight popular and recent articles in a front or center page
- Guides readers toward related or relevant content
- Multi-lingual support
Confluence has a wide range of integrated features, but you can also extend those features with add-ons. Especially international organizations benefit from translation tools in the ATLASSIAN Marketplace with accurate translations.
- Tags, labels
Labels are keywords or tags to brand pages, blog posts, attachments, and spaces. Create labels to categorize, identify or bookmark the content in Confluence. This ensures an easy way to find the right content quickly. One important mistake in many companies is to work without rules or pre-defined naming conventions. Employees can therefore label anything as they want to.
Use cases for tags and labels are:
- Group pages and spaces without restructuring the site
- Labels are easy to add or edit and don´t affect the page.
- You can add as many labels as you like to a page or space. But be careful and keep a limit on used labels.
Do you have questions regarding your Confluence set-up? Don´t hesitate to contact us.
Mikail Özkaya / Mikail.oezkaya@lupusconsulting.com /+491725274947