Ask most organisations where their processes are documented and you’ll get three answers: a folder nobody’s opened since 2021, a wiki with eleven pages of varying accuracy, and “ask Sharon”.
The Sharon problem is the real one. Critical process knowledge held by one person is a risk to continuity, a bottleneck for everyone else, and unfair to Sharon, who can never take uninterrupted leave.
We tackle it as a system rather than a documentation sprint, because documentation sprints produce a lot of pages that are wrong within a year.
- Structure first. One home, an information architecture that matches how people search, and a naming convention.
- A template for each type — process, policy, how-to, decision record — so writing one doesn’t require deciding on a format.
- Ownership and review dates on every document. Unowned docs rot silently, and a wrong document is worse than a missing one.
- Capture at the source. Short screen recordings and written steps produced while the work is happening, which is far more likely to get done than a scheduled writing block.
- Findability — real search, sensible tagging, and links from where people are working to the doc they need.
- Pruning. Deleting the obsolete material is as valuable as writing new material.
We usually start with the highest-risk processes: the ones only one person can do, and the ones that hurt most when they’re done wrong.