Companies often first notice this issue when they make their initial hires. When new employees join the company, it becomes clear which information is known by everyone and which information is only known by a few people. It's common to have a “go-to person”—usually seen as a “super-employee.” This role can be gratifying and often leads to promotion due to the value of the knowledge they are owning. Yet, the company depends heavily on them, putting the business at risk if they leave.
New hires naturally rely on this person, failing to gain the knowledge themselves.
Furthermore, companies face a real challenge of creating cross-disciplinary squads that combine diverse areas of expertise to tackle specific business challenges.
Today, we are sharing with you the two most fundamental pieces of the methodology we have built around these practices.
They are the place for the team to find historical context. They should encapsulate in the most atomic possible way all the factors that lead to taking a decision at a given time.
They should be written by one person in your team, usually the one that has lead the decision, and reviewed by somebody else in the same team. Both these people become the authors of the record.
Finally, a decision record should never be updated. If they ever become outdated because of a new decision that supersets them, you should create a new decision record and add a link to it on the old one at the start of page.
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They are the place for the team to find know-hows. Usually in the shape of steps or bullet points, they are the opinionated living state of knowledge about a concrete topic of your business.
They go through through three different states: draft, live, and outdated. When first created, they will sit on the draft state until the related knowledge becomes relevant to the business. At that moment, they will transition to live. Last, whenever something on the business changes making them outdated, it is important to mark them at the top of the page as oudated + the reason and prioritize some time the owner team to update it when it makes sense.
Finally, they may reference decision records to support their arguments. You should aim them to as atomic as possible just like decision records.
Both decision records and standards are transversal to every team in your company. Your tech team can adopt them. Your sales team can adopt them. Of course, the way each of these teams will hook them into their day-to-day work may be very different. But, you want all teams to share their decision records and standards on a single platform. You want the whole company to build a “Knowledge hub”. Its true power will be unveiled when people across teams and departments can just find and discover whatever knowledge in the company they need.