5 ms·

A few of my savvier (small-ish) software buddies use this system: 1) We have an onboarding Google Doc for everyone at the company. It is grouped into heading

by patio11 14y ago

A few of my savvier (small-ish) software buddies use this system: 1) We have an onboarding Google Doc for everyone at the company. It is grouped into headings. One heading might be, e.g., "Common Customer Support Questions" followed by "Query: A customer complains they can't log into the software. Common phrasings for this: X, Y, Z." Research: "Go to page X in the dashboard [detailed in Internal Tools]. Search for... . If you find the customer, use the password reset tool, then copy/paste the following response to the customer, adding in their first name if you can reasonably guess it. If the tool reports no results, forward email to foo@bar.com and send no response." 2) Every time the proprietor gets tired of a genre of emails, they improve either the internal tools or the business rules to optimize themselves out of that workflow. 3) There is frequently a catch-all rule saying something like "If you have a novel situation and think you can handle it for under $100, do so [see: Getting Access To A Company Card], and fill in why the situation was novel, how you handled it, and what you spent on your weekly report Google doc. Don't worry, we trust you to use your judgement." (This is probably among the best pieces of actionable advice Tim Ferris ever gave.) 4) Capturing this state machine as a Google doc means the business has a memory longer than the individual workers, which is particularly important in a virtual-company sort of situation where you're dealing with VAs/freelancers who a) will often not pan out and b) when they do pan out have an expected lifetime tenure with the company of 6 ~ 24 months only.

Poiesis 14y ago
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.
- larrys 14y ago
  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.
- philwelch 14y ago
  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.
  - j45 14y ago
    Any document is only as good as it is maintained. A wiki has to be searchable, editable for the most basic of user as well that would be modifying it.
    - philwelch 14y ago
      ...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.
      - j45 14y ago
        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 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.
        philwelch 14y ago
        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.
        14y ago
- Legion 14y ago
  At my company, we've switched from a wiki to Google Drive to lower the barrier of contributing. As a programmer, wiki syntax seemed pretty obvious to me. But it was a block for some of the non-coders.
- ConstantineXVI 14y ago
  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.
caseysoftware 14y ago
"Every time the proprietor gets tired of a genre of emails, they improve either the internal tools or the business rules to optimize themselves out of that workflow." I really like this point.. I always think of the FAQ as a bug list. If a question comes up repeatedly enough that people have to start searching for a solution, odds are there are a way more people not asking and you're losing conversions.
- wikwocket 14y ago
  This is sometimes phrased as "fix every problem twice," ie solve the immediate problem, and then figure out what to do so this problem doesn't happen again. This can be done via tweaking your funnel or workflow, adding an FAQ entry, adding tooltips, restructuring your UI to make things intuitive, solving a technical glitch, etc. Joel Spoksky has a great article covering this here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/customerservice.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/customerservice.html

by patio11 14y ago

Poiesis 14y ago

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.

larrys 14y ago
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.
philwelch 14y ago
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.
- j45 14y ago
  Any document is only as good as it is maintained. A wiki has to be searchable, editable for the most basic of user as well that would be modifying it.
  - philwelch 14y ago
    ...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.
    - j45 14y ago
      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 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.
      - philwelch 14y ago
        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.
        14y ago
Legion 14y ago
At my company, we've switched from a wiki to Google Drive to lower the barrier of contributing. As a programmer, wiki syntax seemed pretty obvious to me. But it was a block for some of the non-coders.
ConstantineXVI 14y ago
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.

caseysoftware 14y ago

"Every time the proprietor gets tired of a genre of emails, they improve either the internal tools or the business rules to optimize themselves out of that workflow." I really like this point.. I always think of the FAQ as a bug list. If a question comes up repeatedly enough that people have to start searching for a solution, odds are there are a way more people not asking and you're losing conversions.

wikwocket 14y ago
This is sometimes phrased as "fix every problem twice," ie solve the immediate problem, and then figure out what to do so this problem doesn't happen again. This can be done via tweaking your funnel or workflow, adding an FAQ entry, adding tooltips, restructuring your UI to make things intuitive, solving a technical glitch, etc. Joel Spoksky has a great article covering this here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/customerservice.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/customerservice.html