A supervisor goes on leave for two weeks. Within three days, four people have discovered that they do not know how something is done.
She has done it herself, the same way, for six years. Nobody has ever asked her to write it down because she was always available to ask.
When she comes back she spends a day answering questions about a process she could have documented in forty minutes at any point in those six years.
Step 1: find out what only one person knows
Ask the team which tasks would stop if a particular person were away. The list comes back quickly and it is usually shorter and more alarming than expected.
Step 2: prioritise by risk, not by complexity
A simple process that only one person knows is a bigger risk than a complicated one three people understand. Rank by exposure rather than by how impressive the task is.
Step 3: watch rather than ask
Sit with somebody while they do it and record what happens. Asking an expert to write down what they do produces an account missing every step they no longer notice.
Step 4: capture the decision points
Most processes are not linear. Where somebody chooses between two paths, what they are deciding on is the valuable part and it is the part most often omitted.
Step 5: record what happens when it goes wrong
The exceptions are why the process needs a person at all. A document covering only the happy path fails at the exact moment somebody consults it.
Step 6: write it for somebody who has never done it
Jargon, abbreviations and assumed context make a document useless to the person who most needs it, which is by definition somebody unfamiliar.
Step 7: have the expert correct it rather than write it
Reviewing a draft is a twenty minute job and writing from nothing is one nobody ever starts. This single reversal is what gets documentation finished.
Step 8: keep each document to one process
Long combined documents go unread. One task, one page, findable by the name somebody would actually search for.
Step 9: store it where people already look
Not in a folder somebody has to be told about. Documentation in a separate system nobody opens is the same as no documentation at all.
Step 10: give it an owner and a review date
Otherwise it will be quietly wrong within a year, and a confidently wrong document is worse than an absent one, which is the discipline in building a single source of truth for answers.
Step 11: update it at the moment of change
Not later. Processes change in small ways constantly, and documentation that is updated in batches is documentation that is never updated.
Step 12: use the questions people ask as the index
What people ask about most is what most needs documenting, which is the method in mapping where repetitive enquiries actually come from.
Step 13: watch for the questions that reveal a gap
Where the same question keeps arriving, the documentation is missing, unfindable or wrong, which is the signal described in the feature question that means your docs are wrong.
Step 14: make the documentation answer people directly
Written material that an assistant can answer from turns a filed document into something that actually resolves questions at the moment they are asked, which is what what a knowledge base is and why your chatbot describes. See features, start at try, and the sector view sits under small business.