Another solution for this is a wiki instead of a Google doc. I've seen it work well. But the important part is to make it easy to use, easy to search, and easy to update. Then just make sure as many questions as possible are answerable by the wiki. About to type an email with an answer? It better have the link to the wiki in it.
I've also seen wikis that just turn into gigantic repositories of stale data that just sit around while tribal knowledge is passed around by word of mouth. This seems to be the default state of the company wiki, really.
...and there must be at least someone, somewhere in your workforce under the impression that maintaining a wiki is somehow either the most productive or the most entertaining use of their time and effort at a given moment. That's the hard part.
Totally. A company that doesn't want to pay attention to why they do things a certain way, and keep evolving it, doesn't care to grow, or stay in business.
Too often, excuses from a site like http://www.yourlogicalfallacyis.com sums up why an organization doesn't maintain enough documentation of their business and the knowledge contained with it, and it's free to just walk out the door.
Now that's a little harsh. The fact is, every company where I've seen the internal wiki go stale is also a company that is otherwise incredibly successful. Though important processes were also documented by some additional formal process, and the wiki was a lower-priority thing anyway. Or at least, important wiki pages seemed to be better maintained.
I've observed with clients while systemizing their businesses: In the long run in those who don't keep it a priority to document, improve and transfer their knowledge capital regularly, peak out, stall and fade.
By failing to bake into the bread of their culture that understanding and sharing the why to do things a certain way.. maintaining their competitive advantage, they inevitably are exposed to becoming less effective, productive, efficient, ultimately welcoming a culture of accepting less and less.
It's also probably worth noting that I'm not talking about creating a mistake manual, but rather a why manual that helps teach the mindset that creates the types of mindset required to make decisions to grow the business
Businesses that become institutions do so with cultivating a a 50 to 100 year mindset, but few have a 10 year mindset to take what we do today and make sure it's happening while we find the next way to grow.
I don't think we disagree. Maybe you work with smaller and younger businesses than I've been employed in, because in my experience there's always SOME means of formal documentation, with the wiki as an optional layer on top of that. Or else, a really uneven wiki with some well maintained pages (generally the ones you actually need more often) and some stale data.
I agree, and so it always puzzles me why wikis are so hard to maintain. We use Google Sites at my job, and I've never found them particularly fluid, intuitive or efficient.
A markdown based wiki would be a decent start, but I still overall feel like this is an unsolved problem.
I think a lot of the problem is whenever you don't easily "see" all the information. In a document you can scan it beginning to end, and get an idea of what needs work. In a wiki you need to click through to other pages to see whether subsidiary pages need work.
Perhaps a wiki that allows pulling in "snippets" from linked pages could help.
I find a wiki that is less markdown based, but more ms word like seems to do well. Fogbugz is one example. You give up some and get some other stuff that just makes it a functional linker of docs
Besides no easy internal linking, Google Docs isn't that far off from a wiki. And as a bonus, non-technical people just see it as an ordinary word processor and don't have to understand the concept any further.
Agree. I also use a personal wiki (twiki) to keep track of all the answers and processes that I have figured out and need to use over time. Started many years ago it's close to 1900 pages at this point.
