How To Build A Knowledge Management System For Your Company

Intro

How many times have you documented something for your team only to find out that people aren’t following the process?

To make things worse people are duplicating work as they go through their day and all that wasted effort is why you’re not reaching OKRs.

Are you surrounded by idiots? Or is it just that the way you’re organising your company knowledge base isn’t working?

I’m gonna guess the second because I’ve seen it way too many times.

Solving this usually comes down to 3 things which we’ll go through in this video and by the end you’ll have a framework in place for your company knowledge base that aligns AND enables your team to get things done on time IN THE QUALITY you’d expect. Let’s get into it!

Getting started

Getting your team to work effectively starts with defining what good looks like and then documenting it in a way that’s easy to contribute to and allows you to find the answers you’re looking for in seconds.

Most companies fail because they don’t have a clear structure in place OR the way they’re organising their knowledge base is siloed.

I know what you’re thinking: c’mon what’s the worst that could happen?

How about your teams wasting time working on the same things because departments don’t know what the others are working on?

Or finding out before a launch that you have to start over because insights from a key team weren’t taken into consideration?

Better yet: everyone contributes and now you have so much duplication that you no longer have a single source of truth. Now everyone is working in different ways!

That’s my definition of a nightmare.

But the fix is simple: Organise your knowledge base EARLY in a way that it scales. It’s less effort than you think!

Let’s see what makes a good Knowledge Management System (KMS) and how it impacts your company overall!

What a good KMS looks like

A good system

1. allows you to capture good ideas instantly so they’re not forgotten,

2. it’s easy to navigate whenever you need to update it or need others to contribute, and

3. it enables you to find the answer you’re looking for in seconds!

When done right it creates alignment within your organisation, enables employees to work autonomously and teams to work together effectively.

But how do you do all this?

By defining ownership (who does what by when), making sure the core documentation can be trusted as a single source of truth, and setting it up for scale by which I mean you can delegate documentation to employees so as a leader you don’t have to do it on your own and best practices are retained even if someone ends up leaving the company.

The 4 tools you need

Okay now you need to design a system but with all the tools out there how do you know which to choose?

Well first of all you only need a maximum of 4 tools to get started and I’ll give you an idea of how to choose the right ones for you.

Wiki

The first tool you’re going to need is a wiki where you document the backbone of your company. Goals, Processes, Roles and responsibilities, News, the list goes on. This will serve as your single source of truth.

Nothing and I mean NOTHING makes its way in here without it being reviewed by leadership.

Okay, but then how can I delegate documentation you ask? That brings us to tool number two:

Quick capture

This is where members of your team will take notes and collaborate asynchronously and when complete you as a leader can merge the finished product to the wiki.

It’s also where you jot down ideas on the fly that may impact company goals.Now you need to define clear ownership and deadlines to get things done so the third tool you need is a task manager.

Task manager

This is where projects are broken down to actionable pieces with clear owners and stakeholders assigned. You can then map dependencies, agree on a timeline, and start collaborating.

Now, ever had an outage? Having a core system go down can stop your company in its tracks and it can happen whether your vendor is a small startup or a large enterprise. So the last system you need is Storage.

Storage

You’ll want to back up your documents regularly so your team can stay on track even if you have a temporary service outage that lasts for a week or two. I lived through one of these and hope you don’t have to.

How to choose the right tools for you?

You might already have a few ideas on which tools you want to buy based on personal experience but before you pull out your credit card let’s validate if it’s the right fit for your company.

You’ll want to review the tools based on 6 traits:

Ease of use

Top of the list is ease of use. You can buy the market leader if no one wants to adopt it. I find that people are up for anything that makes their lives easier so it all comes down to removing friction. To me that’s ease of use.

Platform agnostic

Secondly you need the tool to work across platforms. You may have marketers working on MacBooks, Infrastructure Engineers working on Linux, and external consultants with a preference for Windows.

If you choose a tool that’s exclusive to the Apple ecosystem your team has no way of collaborating asynchronously.

Accessibility

Then we need tools to be accessible. With time your systems will evolve and if they don’t play nice with other tools you’ll be forced to migrate and the opportunity cost of lost productivity is high.

Check if the tools you’re considering have a solid API or come with out of the box integrations for other services.

Portability

At number four we have portability. No matter how much thought you put into choosing the right tool, life happens and you might be forced to change vendors down the line.

To make this possible you should be able to export data with ease so a migration can be done with reasonable effort.

Decentralise

If you made it this far you might be thinking: Viktor I know tools that have all this functionality in a single platform! Can I just use that? I mean sure. If you want someone to have that kind of power over you. Go ahead!

But what happens when that system goes down or they raise prices at the renewal to an unreasonable level? Are you fine with yielding to them?

Probably not so you need to build a decentralised system no matter how enticing it is to use an all-in-one solution.

So now you bought into the idea of a decentralised system and have people switching between tools. Context switching is a silent productivity killer so the last thing you need is:

Unified organisation

This isn’t a tool but a process, and Forte Labs already created the solution. Welcome to PARA.

What's PARA?

PARA is an organisation system that’s comprehensive, flexible AND actionable.

It stands for Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives.

1. It’s comprehensive because you can use it in all the locations where you’re storing data like the 4 tools I mentioned (Wiki, Quick Capture, Task Manager, and Storage),

2. it’s flexible because it can adapt to any project or concept you’re working on, and

3. it’s actionable because you can break down projects into executable tasks with clear owners defined.

The problem with PARA

The way Tiago Forte designed it works nicely but I found that you still end up with partially siloed knowledge when it comes to managing your business.

Why is that?

By design you have Projects that you’re working on. Nothing new so far. Areas which are meant to be departments and each project assigned to a department. Then you have a pool of resources that you can tap into for any project, and Archives so you never lose precious knowledge but have records of past versions of processes, documents, assets, etc.

Now imagine you’re preparing your Go To Market strategy. GTM teams usually consist of Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, and Product and they all need to collaborate for a successful product launch. Which department is the project going to live under?

See my problem?

Luckily there’s a simple fix that I’ve been using and it improves visibility a ton!

Implement PARA the right way

In my personal life the 3 areas are Health, Wealth, and Relationships which can be considered as North Stars or Directions. Along those lines for your business instead of treating an Area as a Department you would assign projects to North Stars or Strategic Directions.

A perfect example of this could be KAIZEN (the Japanese term for Continuous Improvement) which is a strategy where employees at all levels of a company work together proactively to achieve regular, incremental improvements.

It’s the perfect example because “improvement” is never going to be tangible. It’s not a destination you can reach - but it’s one hell of a direction! Let’s look at some other examples to get the juices flowing.

Health

A North star equivalent for Health in Business could be Brand Health or what is the general perception people have when they hear about your company. This can be positive or negative based on anything from features, to the mission and vision, to how employees are treated, etc.

Wealth

An equivalent for Wealth can be Increasing TAM (or Total Addressable Market) which you can do by opening operations in a new country or launching a new product. Another example for Wealth could be Market Penetration which would be increasing your presence in a different customer segment but still within the same geographic area OR adapting your solution to serve the needs of more stakeholders. One is aimed at Width, the other one is Depth. Competitive businesses need to strive for both.

Relationships

Lastly an example for Relationships in business could be building and nurturing a healthy culture, like hiring responsibly and taking care of the wellbeing of your people so they want to stay and grow with you.

So we have Brand Perception, Increasing TAM, Market Penetration, and Building a healthy culture.

These directions are specific enough to align people and broad enough that multiple departments can contribute to the company journey - and with that you’ve demolished this last knowledge silo in your company.

On a final note PARA also serves as an efficient eliminator. You may have a great idea for a new project but if it doesn’t align with one of the north stars it’s probably not worth doing. Likewise if a task doesn’t impact the success of a project it’s also not worth doing.

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