Knowledge management best practices
- Articles the structure implies
- 72
- Hours to write them all once
- 108
- What writing them costs once
- $6,264
The one external figure on this site is a statute, quoted and linked: 44 U.S.C. 3507, the Paperwork Reduction Act, which caps an approved federal information collection at three years so that even a form has to come back and prove it is still needed. The National Archives records control schedules are cited beside it as the other place a review cadence is written down rather than assumed. Everything else on these pages is your own count of categories, articles and owners, with the arithmetic printed next to each figure it produces.
Almost everything written under this heading is a list of virtues nobody can act on. What separates a base that is still true in two years from one that is quietly wrong is a short set of habits, each of which is a decision somebody has to make once and then hold. The five below are the ones that keep turning up in bases that lasted, and the two habits that look responsible and are not.
Open the Knowledge base template Free to use. No account, no card, no sign-up.
Name an owner per article, before anybody writes
The owner is not the author. The owner is whoever would be asked whether the article is still true, and the job is to answer that question on a date. Assigning owners after the writing turns into a negotiation nobody wins, because by then the article exists and owning it is a cost with no credit attached.
Make the review date do something when it passes
A date that produces nothing is a field in a database. Choose one of three consequences and hold it: a message to the named owner, a visible mark on the page telling the reader it is unverified, or unpublishing. The middle one is right for most companies because it is honest to the reader and loses nothing.
Write the answer in the first paragraph
An article that opens with background gets abandoned and the reader goes and asks a colleague, which is the outcome the base exists to prevent. Answer first, qualify second, explain third. The reader who needs the explanation will keep reading and the one who does not is already gone with what they came for.
Title it in the asker's words, not the company's
Internal vocabulary belongs in the body where search will still catch it. The title belongs to whoever is searching, which usually means the customer's noun rather than the product team's, and it is the single cheapest quality change available on an existing base.
Delete rather than soften
An article describing something the company no longer does should go, with a redirect where an obvious successor exists. Editing it into vagueness keeps it in the search results and removes the one signal that would have told a reader to distrust it. A smaller base searches better, and that compounds.
Refuse the two that look responsible
A template every article must follow and an approval workflow for every change both produce compliance activity and fewer articles. The first makes short answers long; the second makes a typo fix a two-day round trip, and people stop fixing typos long before they stop noticing them.
A base the Knowledge management best practices does not fit?
Two things the planner does not cover, and they are the two situations people write to us about. The first is a base that is really one enormous category: the arithmetic still runs, but the answer it gives is misleading, because the cost of a hundred articles in one undivided section is not the writing, it is that nobody can find anything and the review load lands on one person. The second is a company whose article owners are contractors rather than staff, where a six-month review cycle collides with contracts that end sooner than that and ownership has to transfer with the work. Tell us which you have and one person reads it: we answer by email, within a working day, and we do not call.
Knowledge bases: the questions that come up
How often should an article be reviewed?
By class, never uniformly. Pricing, policy and anything customer-facing wants a short cycle; a how-to about a stable internal system can go a year. A single global interval is wrong in both directions at once, and it is the most common thing a new program gets wrong.
Who should hold the whole thing together?
One named person with an hour a week and the standing to ask a manager why their team's article is four months overdue. A committee cannot chase anybody, which is why committees do not work here.
What should be reported upward?
Overdue articles by team, and the count of questions people asked that the base did not answer. Both point at an action. Article counts and page views point at nothing and quietly reward writing pages nobody needed.
Does a small company need all six?
It needs an owner and a consequence for the review date from the first article. Titles and deletion matter from a few dozen articles. Refusing the template and the approval workflow costs nothing and should be decided before somebody proposes them.
Kbasevo Pro
Keep the library, and know which articles have gone stale
The planner tells you what the base will cost. Pro is for the month after launch, when the writing is done and the only question left is which of these 72 pages nobody has looked at since.
- Download the plan as a file you can edit, circulate and keep.
- Your plan without our name on the footer of every page.
- Keep this plan, with its version number and the date it was made.
- Your company's name and logo on the plan instead of ours.
- Export every article and every review at once, for a handover or an audit.
- Send the review reminder to the article's owner when it comes due, from inside the workspace.
$29per month, whole team
Start Kbasevo Pro Free for 14 days. No card needed. PricingThe first 14 days are free and no card is asked for. Add a card during the trial and the first charge is on the day it ends; do not, and your workspace becomes read-only with nothing deleted. Kbasevo Pro is $29 a month. It renews on the same date each month at the same price until you cancel, and the price you sign up at is the price you keep for as long as the subscription runs.