Hi, everybody. Welcome to episode three of our webinars dealing with the challenging situation that will having, whether what are coming out of it, whether going into it, but we're all working. Thankfully, we're all grateful for the jobs that we have, and we also have challenges. But with challenges also go opportunities. In this webinar, we're gonna talk about the knowledge management specifically and business community the business continuity. Now, how do how are you keeping working for ourselves, for others within our organization? You know, what can we do? So I would I think the best thing is I'll ask Rochelle and Roger to please introduce themselves us about themselves, please. Rochelle, go ahead. My name is Rochelle Fisher. I'm now the knowledge manager, the team leader for the tech writers sentinel one. I've been a tech writer for more than twenty years. I've worked in, checkpoints and, submission rehearsal software, and video conferencing software. I have no one. Thank you, Michelle. Roger. Could you Yeah. Hi. I'm Roger Gelix, and I'm the technical writer, at Halifax, which works in the, third party administration and health plan industry. And I've been a health expert for about two years, and I've been in the technical writing and training world for about six years. Super. Thank you. So the first question to you, and and this this really is about documentation. It's not it's not just a general issue in terms of how we've been managing, but not necessarily a team. You can talk about your teams as well if there's always of interest. How how how is the team migrated? You know, you know, if it's been simple and natural process. If it's been a forced and utter process. But more how how's it been with the whole company? And, you know, how how is content being part of a story? Of maybe helping others in your company to work remotely. Roger? So I think, HealthEx they adjusted to I'd say probably about twenty percent. HealthEx's workforce was already working remotely, and then the other eighty percent of us you know, we're all working from home pretty suddenly. But I think overall, it's definitely become more important to write down everything. It's a lot easier when you work in an office to be able to just wander by somebody's cubicle to ask them something about something from so many years ago because you know it's in their head, but I think this is definitely showcasing me how important it is to write down all the information no matter how old or how new it is, because you never know who's gonna need to access it. And I think especially within my group, that's definitely been more important than ever, and even just sharing documents back and forth as a way to keep notes. You know, you can't rely on the whiteboard at the conference room anymore. You gotta actually have it written down somewhere and be able to get to it quickly. So even internally, that's been a deal for us. I've got a question on that, but first to the channel. Will you ask your question too? You ask your question first because now I've got things to add. So, Noxy, you said you said Roger that you, wrote down of what what about the planning that goes into? You just don't write it down and put it into some wiki and some random place. You know, how much time and investment as the company puts to thinking through how we're going to write this down, how we organize it, how we're going to share it, and how are people going to access the content? Sure. Well, I think they're having to make those decisions now. I I'd have to say that that it's still ongoing, you know, even a month into the lockdown situation for us or, I guess, more like two at this point. I think we're still figuring out the best way to do it honestly. There's a lot of Some people are better about writing things down than others. Sometimes there's longer term decisions that have to be made, but I think overall, I think even department by department ain't everybody's handling it differently, unfortunately. That's I wouldn't say it's necessarily, you know, everybody's doing one way. Do it doing it one way. I think every department is figuring out their own way to plan these things out even from a C suite level. You know, god forbid something happened to me. If we were to go if somebody were to log in to the health acts account of Polygo and see all the content there. What would they do with it? What should I be paying attention to? What are the settings that we've gotten configured and how do we generally publish to the to our output? You know, what is the process for that? Cause it's one thing for me to know it really well. But it's another for somebody to come in after me or my manager to come in to try to figure out how did Roger have this set up I got you. We have the same thing, but this week plan from the very beginning just from experience, we knew that we wanted to have a team handbook and one big section is the tool. So we started this one. We were first doing a PO see, all the tools that we wanted. We were keeping track of it in our wiki. And it's like, how do we write procedures? What tags do we use in Plego? What kind of words do we use? What kind of standards do we use for? Can you get all this information? We have a huge wiki. Besides that, confluence is used by the whole company. So we're a global company. So we didn't have this issue that you had where It's like, oh, now we have to scramble and find something. We had a different issue a year ago that not just in in globally even in one site, different teams were using different tools to document internal things. Like, I mean, there were just so many. There was almost fifty different tools that people were pulling information from. It was in the days confluence Herera, and we have a Slack and it's a professional is Zoom recordings, you know, it just went on and on and on. So by the time we finally got here, even though management hadn't made a decision and said, this is what we're all going to use, and that's it. We had all kind of siphoned off the tools we didn't like. So, basically, everybody in the company is using Slack or anything that can be written down quickly. Google docs for projects and to comment, comment on each other. And, Zoom, for any meetings because we've had some people working remotely. And now, of course, there's a lot more zoom there's a lot more slack, but it's it's been almost a natural transition, you know. Yeah. Which is it sounds kinda weird, but Yeah. So I guess we were kind of helped by the fact that, those of us who came in and started it this was a startup When we can then we said first thing we have to do is set up our internal documentation. What do we wanna use? How are we gonna make it work? Okay. And that's the next question. No. What benefits, and maybe what you've done as well for a good knowledge and tool for the company again, not just the user guide. I mean, you mentioned confluence, right, and and Slack. How are you to spending that information between different people. How are people accessing it? What pain points have you had? Have you had trouble with people wanting information and not getting it or bad decisions made because of lack of information like Roger said, they're not sit banging each other on the back and having a little chat over coffee about things. What what have you seen on on in these things, Roger? So I think, you know, Rochelle, you mentioned your company. You've got multiple places where your storing information, you've got Google docs, you've got Slack, you know, random word documents maybe, that type of thing. I think how I think we're in my experience. That's similar. We've had I think we've had multiple attempts to centralize information in various places, but I think after every attempt, somebody has found something else to try. But instead of re centralizing the information somewhere else, it's kind of become there's a several competing information avenues. You know, for example, I might get a slack from somebody asking, hey, do we have anything about this? And then I go through, well, if they checked this, if they checked this, if they checked this, and then there's, like, several things, And it's so the problem is not always is did we have it written down? It's okay. If it is written down where what's the source of truth for because oftentimes it's maybe the same information was written down in three different ways, but which is the one to go which what is the one that should be trusted. And if that is the one that should be trusted once you've figured out which one that is, what do you do with the other information that's already somewhere else? So even from a granular level, I think we're having to make those decisions about how do we manage the information that we have you know, who who's empowered to delete stuff that's out of date. How do you, you know, how do you make those decisions of Okay. We're all going to start using this platform to record our information. I think that's always a challenge. Right. Again, we We have people, I guess, that with more experience, we knew this was gonna happen. Like I said, a a year ago, we started saying, you know, maybe we're gonna end up with conflicting information. We start handling this. So we did say, like, the tech writers would be responsible for everything that went on the internal, knowledge base. Which is on Zendesk, and we're the only ones who can delete it. And if anybody wants to change it, they have to ask us or get special. And then there's a consequence by spaces, and there are very strict mission set on that. I mean, SCs can take certain things. They can't even see the rest. Developers can change whatever they want on their space. And then when you say, okay. Well, if you're talking about this stuff on Slack, I did a search on the console, so I didn't find it. I did a search on Slack, and I found it. Is it right or is it not? Will you know exactly who you can talk to? Mhmm. So let's say that person is gone and then you you can go to the person who was in that space in conflict that, you know, you didn't talk about all of these, valid values for this one command, but I found it on Slack. I left the company three months ago. Is it correct or not? And I was like, oh, yeah. It is correct. I should have put it in my wiki. Thank you. So it's like, everybody I think you were right. What you were saying that you have to say? Who is responsible for it, but you can't say that detective, writers are going to be responsible for all the documentation I mean, if you can, then your company's really small and you're gonna it's not scalable or sustainable in the future. I think in the future, no matter what size company you have, people should be responsible for their own knowledge and with with the the knowledge with the feeling and the responsibility that this is one of their deliverables. This is one of their productivity outputs for which they are, you know, measured in the end. This part of their performance. And it and and then it's just like, is it there? Is it correct? Is it updating? Is it safe? Is it available for the people who need it? All those things are, like, measured in the end so that it becomes part of everything that they do. And that's something on the side, not some overhead. Sure. Well, that's interesting that you mentioned how It's it's everybody's responsibility, but it's not necessarily one person's, you know, that's not their whole that's not the whole thing that they're measured on either. I I think that's pretty common. In in my position, because I'm the only technical writer at my organization at all. So there is sort of so when it comes to certain things that I'm documenting, it's I'm where the buck stops. But when it comes to, like, the information that I'm using to create by product, that's the information that sometimes sometimes it's reliable, sometimes it's not. And so that's where I think the challenge is is trying to figure out how do we How do people bathe maintain that responsibility for the knowledge that they have and keeping the knowledge up to date and not just for me, but for other people in the company who need to reference it. It helps a lot if you're also proactive and you say like, okay, I see it from the date. Every almost every tool you've got for documentation. You'll have a date on it. You can say I see about this date. It wasn't updated for two versions back. Not really important that date itself, but how far it is along the lifeline of the product. Sure. I'm saying it it hasn't been up to are. Is it accurate? If you're just a little bit productive and say, you know, can you look at this, then they will tell you. And so, you know, we we might be like the little squeaky wheel and that whole documentation maintenance thing, but we don't have to do everything ourselves. We're not the right people to be documenting that kind of stuff anyway. We we shouldn't demand a quality of documentation that can go out to customers. Right. You could demand a quality that they can output very would be without too much overhead. But, mostly, we should demand accuracy and access. So I was I was just gonna say, I think oftentimes the the the fear is, well, I don't wanna delete this even though I know it's inaccurate. Because what if somebody was looking at this and needed it for something else? I think sometimes there's that hesitant nature of, well, I don't wanna be the one to delete this and then mess it up for somebody else. When oftentimes, yeah, there needs to be this empowered. No. If something's not right, go ahead and just delete it. If you know that for a fact, then go for it. And Don't delete. Don't delete. Get it get a tool where you can, like, Like, if you're on consulance, you just say, like, this is not true from the state to this state, and then you just kinda like Right. Shade it all in gray. Or, you know, or or just say there was this old document and now I've attached it as a text file or don't delete. Oh my goodness. Yeah. Well, I I should probably rephrase and say, sometimes it's deleting in the sense that it is the same information as something else, but There might be one or two things that are quite the same. But to your point, you're right. The the first next action should be Don't delete the whole thing, find the part that is accurate, see if you can relocate that to somewhere else. Yeah. And then go from there. Because, yeah, to your point, like, yeah, deleting everything is usually not a good plan. I I'd like to, if possible, I wanna ask you a more strategic question. Okay. Maybe not even after this before, but I think it's relevant now to ask. You know, if if I go back down the years when I started, long long time ago. Writing was kind of right at the end of the road map, and it was sometimes wasn't even on the road They'd make a product. The writing was wasn't even originally planned. We've got further our our voices have become more heard and more influential. And there are some some companies where really they they do respect the documentation people a lot and they realize it can be good documentation helps sales as well as just reducing support tickets. But if you are part of this strategic, I I think company now. Should hostel's strategic receipt strategic planning committee for managing the the dissemination of the document of the content, company relevant. Again, not just tech writing, but content relevant. They can learn a lot from us. What do you think they could learn from us as as documentation people being part of a strategic committee for the whole organization of sharing information. What skills do we have that that could maybe that we've learned, you know, through sweat and pain. Right? Let's say you were the complete autocrat. Right? You were the dominating, dominating leader of your company, and whatever you says goes, right, and people have to listen, what would that what what would you have that committee do? Whatever you said went. I would say, developing some sort of chain of custody system, I think, is the only way this is that sustainable. Rochelle, you kinda Can I just repeat repeat that, please? Sure. I was just gonna say, I think developing a chain of custody system is going to be really important for making sure any kind of information architecture stays fresh and stays relevant for the organization. Can you explain what that means? Sure. So Rochelle, you were talking about how in your organization you have only certain people can actually go in and make changes to information. I think that's a big part of it. I think if everybody has all the same level of access to everything, I think that's where it can kinda fall apart because Nobody really takes that responsibility as seriously because they think that another colleague could probably do that if they want to. And some people are not necessarily going to ever be very passionate about keeping things updated and keeping things relevant. So having a system where, hey, if you see something that's not correct, here's what to do. That way, it's less of a hey, if you see something, do whatever you think is best, because I think anytime there's a, hey, why don't you you make a judgment call, you know, if you're not necessarily in the business of making those types of decisions and don't necessarily feel very confident in doing it or if you just decide that's not my job, then it's probably never gonna happen. So but that being said, I think, yeah, if I was, like, in charge of these types of things, I think it would be identify a few individuals to be the ones in charge of, you know, maintaining any published information, either internally or externally. You know, if this is all there, only these few people can change it. If something needs to be changed, we need to know why. And then that way, that's why the kind of the quality is there as well. And that way, you know that when the change is made to the information that's available, you know, that it wasn't done, you know, it wasn't done last minute or it wasn't done without a lot of thought. My idea was a little bit different. It's not that only certain people can touch it. It's only that certain people can touch the space of their documents. Like, you can put a Google doc and say who can comment and who can edit it. Or you have a wiki space and you have permissions, you can see it, who can change it, who can add comments, that type of thing. To say that a small baby or small number, people have total responsibility and a forty over the all of the documents, I think it's a mistake because when you're writing it, you own it. And if you don't have any responsibility or opportunity to write anything, you have no ownership. So I think that if you kind of do leave it open for some thinking of a smaller kind of company, even when I worked in a very large company like checkpoint, the different departments worked like small companies almost. So it's like everybody go ahead and take your hand. And people would be afraid if they knew their English wasn't good or they were having problems with, you know, a structural or or like somebody really creative getting his thoughts down on paper in a very structured format then they would be afraid and they would ask for help or go ahead and make a mistake and then let me look at it and I'll tell you what, mister, what, you know, to change it. But, this kind of structure I have to say, I'm I don't like putting too many restrictions on it because, well, for example, when we send out a document that is going out to a customer, it has the highest quality and, you know, a lot of the documentation isn't meant for US federal legislation, like, the accessibility. And, that we are conforming with the European guidelines GDP or, Fedram on. These are very strict papers that have to be done exactly right. Even our release notes have to done exactly right. Sure. So when we give it to people to review, we don't say you have to use the system we choose. Somebody says he wants a PDF or send him a PDF since they just do comments. So all the comments are on the file. They don't get attached to anything. If they wanna use Google Docs, they can only comment on they can use it. And if they wanna use inside the league or inside XML or HTML, as long as they're not touching the content and they're just giving us comments, And it all comes back to the same place where we started the conversation, which would be black saying like, okay, here's the document. And everybody sends in your comments. As long as they all come in no matter what media everybody's working on, we can handle it. We just have to go through it for the looked at everything. I think that that's a big change. It is a big change for my team. Because we were more of like, okay. We're the tech writers. This is what we're giving you. Deal with it. Right. And how we're everybody's single. I would prefer to use this with that and we're like, alright. I'll I'll go with this. Go ahead. And It's not that bad. If you have one source that nobody else can touch, go ahead and send me your comments if I ever format or Miller, you know, send it on a Zoom chat, send it as a URL to a link or or send it as a file I'll find it. Just tell me where it is. I will get this stuff. It doesn't it feels a little bit more disorganized, and yet it's friendlier. We're reaching more of our audiences that if, you know, there's always one SME that hates to write comments on a pdf. This doesn't get it. Right? Or they're just no. We don't have that. We're reaching everybody. We're reaching all of our estimates they're happier. They're working faster. They're responding better. It's it's working out. It's not something I would have suggested anybody. Do as you please, but it works. There there there are companies You guys managed, but there are there are there are companies where it's it's a mess and they need some way to organize it. There's no way of them connecting the They've they've gone into remote, and they're finding it very difficult to communicate with us apart from Zoom. That's what I was trying to you got any thoughts, Roger? Yeah. I Rochelle, you talk about, you know, it it's it you kind of beat your head against the wall a little bit because You feel like you wanna make all these decisions about the way exactly we're going to manage this information and some people just will not do it. You know, you'll have you may give them exactly the tools to do it, but they really just wanna know what they're comfortable with. And Yeah. I think that's there's often truth to that. I think what's I think what's also important too is that you don't wanna make it too cult to manage the information that you do have. If there's a big process to, you know, to for a change control of something, then, yeah, I think some people are going to say, why can't I just make a comment in Google Docs like I used to? You know? Like, I think oftentimes, if it's too difficult of a process it gets lost, and they just wanna revert to what they know. And I think that also depends on the the size of the organization too. You know, where I work, we have about a hundred and thirty plus employees. So there's only so many people that can even touch the information at all. But I could see in a company it's in the thousands that, you know, this is a much different animal of how to manage lots of information. Only certain people can't even touch it or look at certain things, and that's where it gets, I think, really complicated, but Yeah. I mean, it's different because it's not like it used to be where we could easily say, okay, we have we're gonna decide on this one system and you all gotta use it. Have fun. It's really more like Okay. We have a lot of different systems you can use. You all have accounts for these various systems. We can't take them all away, so let's figure out the best way to use all of them the way you like to use them while making sure that what goes in front of a customer, that's the thing that really is you know, protected and only certain people can really push that information out. So, like, I yeah. It's like I see both sides I think it's because of how the ease of being able to use other systems though, I think that's where it gets tricky to, you know, legislate exactly what system we're going to use. It used to be. It used to be a much harder. I mean, like, twenty years ago, I was working at a company that partnered with IBM. It was like, every single thing had to be documented according to template and every single spec according to everything there, and it was all printed out somewhere and put on somebody's desk. I think those days are gone. In in every past way. I don't even think IBM works that way anymore. It's like they're cutting down the they're big things into smaller manageable departments in each department is almost doing their own kind of thing, and not everything is documented. And if it is sometimes it's on something that's almost, you know, as fluid as a Google app. But, So, really, I I think the whole idea of structuring and and having these meetings and committees and guidelines for documentation in house or outside I think it's gone. I think even the style guys that we love so much and that we hold on to, I mean, oh, my goodness. Not just the style guide, but I am still stuck on simplify technical English, which is exact grammar and words. Stuck on it because it's so easy to deliver to our customers in Zendesk or in, you know, know, quick PDFs or docs or even just email that should have been something of the bill and just ran with it. There they're coming out so easily. And you know what? In most software in the streets today. It is better to get information out that is ninety percent accurate. Mhmm. Sixty said, perfect grammar and spelling, whatever, than to wait to get the one hundred percent, absolutely perfect. Verify through five different levels and then get it up. We we just can't do that anymore. Just on that. We should have a separate webinar just on that point. Yeah. It's a it's it's it's it's a big change. But let let me ask you about it before to finish one one quick question and that's maybe thirty second to answer. If a company has a really good policy from lunging content and distribution. Do you think it can reduce stress between from the organization, especially in this environment? Ishan or Roger? It depends on what kind of stress people are having. I I think that in this environment specifically, having people read more things is causing more stress. Unless you've got something that comes from the VP or the CEO saying, this is what we're doing. These are guidelines. And it should be really short. Anything else, I think it's just gonna add more stress. Yeah. I think I I think two ways of it. One, we were saying earlier that sometimes it's more informa more important to get the information out quickly. Don't worry as much about the formatting and about exactly following a certain style guide. Just get it out quickly, get it in front of people so that way it's done and out of the way. I I value that approach a lot. I think where it gets tricky is that if only so many people are allowed to do that, and other people still need to communicate, they don't necessarily are they're not necessarily following those rules either. And that kind of gets back to what we were talking about earlier is It it's good as long as everybody's doing it, but not always. But I think it does overall reduce stress if there is at least some sort of strategy around, you know, we're going to communicate it like this in this situation, in these other situations. Maybe we have time to refine it, but, you know, if time is of the essence, we just gotta go for it. Beautiful way to end the discussion, Roger, the best the best answer a lot. So that was a thank you to both of you to to Roger. And Michelle, the the two walls. We appreciate the time and effort you've put in this and also previously that people haven't seen. And we wish you both a lot of success and health, and we should all come through this situation and everybody healthy. Thank you very much. Yeah. Thank you. No problem. Thank you. And good to see you again, Steve, and good to meet you at Rochelle. It's nice to meet you too, Roger.