For IT service desks, shifting left is about sharing your service desk’s knowledge within your organization, bringing it closer to the customer. The basic idea behind shift left is simple: skilled IT professionals make their knowledge available to less experienced front office colleagues, helping them to answer more complex questions from customers.

Here are the five key benefits of shift left for IT service management.

1. Building stronger relationships with IT customers

A definite by-product of being closer to your customer is a steady increase in personal interactions with the rest of the business. Customers will enjoy the way IT shares knowledge. They’ll appreciate your approachable attitude. As an extension, they will also feel more connected with the IT department and more likely to engage with them, which promotes further conversation.

2. Empowering IT users to solve their own issues

Bringing solutions closer to the customer restores balance to the force. Till now, the scales have arguably been tipped out of IT’s favour. Customers use traditional ticket logging technologies to throw any issue at IT. Enabling customers to solve their own problems with a self-service portal decreases IT workload. It allows the customers to be the heroes in their own story. And they won’t have to wait in line for you to fix minor problems.

3. More time for more rewarding work

It doesn’t always have to be about the customer, right? At the end of the day, the quality of your IT services highly depends on the attitude and motivation of the people delivering it.

The idea of shift left is that you share knowledge. To let each line of support, including the customer, solve more challenging issues than they did before. If you outsource your simplest tasks, you have more time for work that’ll help you deliver real value on an organizational level.

4. IT knowledge is shared across the whole business

Shift left is driven by a concept called Knowledge Centered Service (KCS), which is a simple but effective IT support methodology that places the creation and sharing of knowledge at the heart of every IT interaction. Knowledge simply becomes power. The systems used to capture, catalogue and share that power become IT’s most significant offering throughout the whole journey towards shifting left. Take it from us; TOPdesk’s internal service desk teams have implemented the KCS guidance into their own support functions and the positive results on both sides of the service relationship are very encouraging.

Knowledge becomes power. The systems used to capture, catalogue, and share that power become IT’s most significant offering throughout the whole journey towards shifting left.

5. Your IT team get the recognition they deserve

It’s always a good idea to make sure your IT department has proper visibility. CIOs and IT Directors will benefit, since they want positive IT stories to float their way up to the board. Not only does it reflect well on the work of the department, but it gives them far more leverage with negotiating for things such as more funding or adding more people to your team.

Use your IT team’s knowledge for good

Check out our Knowledge Management e-book to discover the benefits of Knowledge Centered Service and how to help your IT department get there.

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With knowledge management, you use the collective knowledge of your service desk employees to resolve incidents instead of constantly having to reinvent the wheel with every new incident.

Using knowledge management best practices can cut your resolution times by 20%. But first, you need a knowledge base.

What is a knowledge base?

A knowledge base is exactly what it sounds like: a place where the collective knowledge of your IT service desk lives, neatly organized into specific categories. With the help of so-called knowledge items, your service desk employees can quickly resolve incidents without any help.

You can even make certain knowledge items available to your end-users, so they can find the answers to simple questions like “How do I connect to WiFi?” themselves.

To make the most out of a knowledge base, your service desk employees should follow these 4 knowledge management best practices:

1. Search the knowledge base first

Handling an incident? Always, always, always search the knowledge base first, even if you know the answer by heart.

Why?

First of all, if the answer is in the knowledge base, using it will save you time typing out a response – even if it’s just a matter of seconds.

But if you don’t know how to proceed with an incident, chances are the problem has been encountered and solved before. In that case, you can simply use the solution that’s in the knowledge base and resolve the incident.

If the answer isn’t available in the knowledge base, make sure to add a knowledge item yourself – however brief – so your colleagues can reap the benefits later.

2. Correct the knowledge base

Your knowledge base is only as effective as the information you feed it is.

Found a knowledge item that’s lacking something? Make sure you update it straightaway, for example when you’ve found a quicker solution to a certain problem. This way, your knowledge base becomes a continuously updated and reliable hub that will benefit the whole IT service desk.

Think of knowledge management as physiotherapy: you need to do some tough exercises at first, but the long term benefits are infinite.

3. Resolve the incident

Now, potentially armed with some new knowledge, you’re ready to resolve the incident.

While doing so, keep an eye and an ear open for anything in the solution process that deviates from what was stated in the original knowledge item.

4. Close the incident

You resolved the incident and can now confidently close the call. Once you do, see if you can add to the answer in the knowledge base. Maybe you need to fix a typo, or the solution needs an update, or the knowledge item could do with a screenshot for extra clarification. Even small changes could be helpful.

Knowledge management is a process

– Remember: knowledge management is a continuous process. If you’re new to it, it might take a while to build up your knowledge base. But as your team adds more and more knowledge items, you’ll notice that they‘re able to resolve incidents more quickly and become more efficient.

Think of knowledge management as physiotherapy: you may need to do some tough exercises at first, but the long–term benefits are infinite.

Share knowledge in your organization

Download our Knowledge Management e-book for more knowledge management tips and tricks.

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But other IT departments are still feeling overstretched. And with 55% of end users expecting a higher level of customer service year on year, that’s no wonder.

Regain control of your IT department

To keep up with these demands, teams like Michael’s need to work smarter. But when you’re firefighting, finding your first step can be a challenge.

Here are some working smarter principles, tips, and tricks you can use on Monday morning to regain conrol of your service desk and maximize your time:

1. Create order

When you’re drowning in work, keeping track of what you need to do is hard – let alone knowing where to start. So, whether you use a whiteboard or a task management app, make your work visual.

2. Prioritize your workload

Once you have an overview of what you need to do, it’s time to start prioritizing. Assess your workload, decide which tasks create most customer value, and organize your time around those. Focus on the top three crucial results of the day first.

3. Don’t rely on email as your agenda

Now that you know what work to focus on, don’t fall into the trap of using your email to track your progress. Write down your tasks elsewhere or keep track of them with an app to avoid getting lost in your inbox.

4. Use a to-don’t list

Instead of working through a never-ending to-do list, try a to-don’t list. Creating a list of things that you shouldn’t do will help you identify non-essential tasks or ones that can easily be postponed.

5. Avoid multitasking

Some people pride themselves on being able to multitask. But doing two – or more! – tasks at once just means you’re more likely to make mistakes. Try focusing on one task and fully completing it before moving on to the next.

6. Don’t aim for perfection

Perfectionism usually makes you work harder, not smarter. If you use a knowledge base, don’t spend hours making all information available when your customers are only going to use 10% of it. Instead, update it whenever you notice certain questions coming in more frequently.

7. Prepare for the next day

Those who fail to prepare, prepare to fail. So, use the end of the workday to prepare for the next. Clean your workspace, check your calendar, create a to-do list for the next day, or make sure your hardware is charged.

8. Don’t be afraid to be a copycat

Working smarter is all about implementing small changes that have a big (and lasting) impact. So, find tips, shortcuts and best practices from thought leaders in your field that work for you – and disregard the ones that don’t.

Ready for your next step?

These eight tips are great start, but they’re only a first step. For long-term results, switch to smart. Discover TOPdesk’s three principles of switching to smart and how to apply them.

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Knowledge Centered Service®

Maintaining a knowledge base might seem like a lot of work, but it’s an investment with excellent returns. A comprehensive but detailed repository of your supporting departments’ knowledge can save the departments a lot of time and effort when it comes to research – but that’s not all. If you grant customers access to the knowledge base, they will be able to answer their own questions, completely bypassing your service departments. Ideal, right?

Yes – but like we said, it is an investment. The reality many service desks face is that it is a challenge to keep the knowledge base up-to-date. This is why the Consortium for Service Innovation has developed Knowledge Centered Service, a set of best practices for knowledge management. We believe that this is the way forward for many service desks, and here’s why.

Knowledge Centered Service is about registering knowledge for every customer, not just the one who happens to ask for it.

What can KCS do for your organization?

There are three big benefits of implementing KCS:

1. Up to 60% shorter lead times and up to 50% increased ‘first time right’ resolutions

This one is all about increasing the performance of your team. On average, service desk employees spend less time per call when they start using KCS. Providing customers with the right solution upon the first attempt means they won’t need as much time going back and forth with the customer about an incident.

This lowers the workload for the service desk, and improves customer experience simultaneously. It’s a win-win situation.

2. New employees are up to speed 70% faster

How long does it take before a new member of your team is up and running? Chances are, you’re prepared to invest some time in onboarding them before they’re ready to work as an independent team member.

With a good knowledge base in place, new employees can consult knowledge items to learn from the experience of their team members. They will be able to resolve recurring calls using knowledge items just as efficiently as their peers in no time.

3. Up to 50% increase in customers independently resolving their own calls

There’s a big chance your customers have turned to the service desk with a question before, only to find out they could have easily resolved their own problem. If only they knew the solution was that simple! That’s why it’s a great idea to help your customers become more self-sufficient.

Share the solutions to common questions in a public knowledge base. This way, customers can start resolving their own calls, and involve your service desk team only when their expertise is needed most.

Rather incredible figures, but they are true.

Implementing KCS

The key to ensuring KCS’ success within your organization is making your supporting departments realize this: KCS is about registering knowledge for every customer, not just the one who happens to ask for it. Once all supporting departments are on board with this, it should be a lot easier to implement the process necessary for KCS.

Based on our experience with lots of KCS implementations, my colleagues and I have made a simple 6-step plan to implement KCS for your team.

Empower your end-users

Do you want to give your end-users the power to resolve their own calls? Make sure they can access your knowledge base – and know where to find it.

Giving your users the access will undeniably mean they solve many of their own problems, without your supporting departments having to get involved.

Share knowledge better in your organization

Want more inspiration on sharing knowledge? Download our Knowledge Management e-book for tips and tricks and a way to calculate your time and cost savings.

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So how can you justify investing in knowledge management when it’s hard to prove its return on investment (ROI)?

Benefits of implementing knowledge management

To help you on your way, we’ve collected the main reasons why you should finally make time to implement knowledge management. And we included a ROI calculator to help you quantify the benefits of knowledge management for your service desk.

So, why should you invest in knowledge management?

1. You spend 20% less time on recurring calls

It’s Friday morning. One of your service desk employees receives a call about the printer: it has a paper jam. This has happened a couple of times already this week – but who fixed it those times? And how? After asking around and going through old calls for half an hour, your service desk employee finally finds the answer and gets back to their customer. But there must be a smarter way of doing this, right?

Correct. Implementing Knowledge Centered Service (KCS)* makes processing recurring calls much faster. In our experience, implementing KCS reduces the time spent resolving a call by 20% within 2 to 4 months.

You can even go one step further and make your knowledge base available to your customers as well. With this infographic for better knowledge management, you can make sure both your service desk employees and your customers can pleasantly use your knowledge base. This way, you prevent calls from happening in the first place because your customers can solve their own problems.

2. You increase your customer satisfaction levels

Your customers want the right answer quickly. Having a knowledge base in place allows you to process more questions in your first line of support. KCS also guarantees high-quality answers, since the information in your knowledge base is based on the collective knowledge of your entire service desk. With quicker and higher-quality answers, you’ll definitely see results – fast.

Do make sure your service desk employees can easily use the knowledge base in their day-to-day work. To check if your knowledge base is in tip-top shape, you can use these 5 knowledge base KPIs for a healthy knowledge base.

3. New employees are up and running much faster

Familiarizing a new co-worker with all aspects of their job often takes a lot of time, especially at a skilled service desk. But what if your new co-worker has a complete knowledge base at their disposal? This way, they immediately have access to all the necessary knowledge and can begin processing simple questions. According to the KCS Academy, KCS helps you achieve a 70% improved time to proficiency.

4. Working at your service desk becomes more fun

Solving calls yourself provides a greater sense of satisfaction than simply forwarding questions to other people. Working on complex issues makes for more of a challenge than repetitive work. But why should you care about how knowledge management makes work at your service desk more fun? Well – happy people provide better service! And greater employee satisfaction levels will decrease staff turnover.

Looking for more ways to improve employee experience? Say goodbye to service desk stress.

With knowledge management, one of your service desk employees could spend two days each week doing other things.

Calculate how much time knowledge management will save

You now know why you should invest in knowledge management. But let’s talk numbers. How much time will investing in knowledge management save exactly?

In our experience, service desk employees spend 20% less time on average on resolving recurring calls within 2 to 4 months of investing in knowledge management. Your service desk employees need around half of the time they save to update and add to the knowledge base. This means that on average, your service desk employees spend 10% less time on resolving recurring calls.

To calculate the time you could potentially save, follow these 3 steps:

1. Determine how many hours your team spends processing calls

Say you have four people working full-time at your front office, and four other people who spend two days a week on calls in the back office. You would end up with the following calculation: [4 x 40] + [4 x 16] = 224 hours a week.

2. Estimate what percentage of calls could be solved faster

Usually, around 60 to 90% of all calls could be resolved in less time with a knowledge base in place. Of course, this doesn’t apply to all scenarios: some calls, such as complaints, simply can’t be resolved more efficiently. Consult your service management tool and go through a list of all recent calls to estimate the percentage.

3. Use this formula to estimate the time you could save each week

[…] hours a week spent on calls x […] % of calls that could be resolved faster using knowledge management x 0.10 (net time savings) = hours of time saved each week

Let’s look at an example. Say your teams spend a joint total of 224 hours a week on processing calls, and 75% of your calls could be resolved faster with knowledge management. This results in the following calculation:

224 hours a week x 0.75 of calls x 0.10 = 16.8 hours of time saved each week.

This means that one of your service desk employees could spend two days each week doing other things. Let that sink in for a moment. Your service desk employees could spend this extra time analyzing recurring incidents to identify root problems or gathering customer feedback to find out how to best increase your customer satisfaction. Or they could be making your customers more self-reliant by setting up a service catalogue and implementing a self-service portal. The possibilities are endless!

Start implementing knowledge management at your service desk

Now that you know how much time knowledge management can actually save, you can start thinking about implementing knowledge management at your service desk. Download our knowledge management guide to find out which concrete steps you can take to successfully start your knowledge management process.

*Knowledge Centered Service is a method developed by the Consortium for Service Innovation. This article is an interpretation of that method and in no way suggests to be the correct one. All rights and interpretations belong to the Consortium for Service Innovation and can be found on www.serviceinnovation.org. KCS® is a service mark of the Consortium for Service Innovation™

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5 steps to implement KCS

Based on my experience with lots of KCS implementations, my colleagues and I have made a 5-step plan to implement KCS for your team. We tried our best to make it as simple and easy to implement as possible. In this blog, I’ll explain how to lay all the groundwork for implementing KCS. In part two, I will go into training your team and monitoring your progress.

Step 1: Set your goals

Before you embark on your KCS journey, let’s start with setting some project goals. Write your goals on post-its together with your project group and prioritize them. For your most important goals, you’ll determine benchmarks and  set up reports at a later stage.

Need some inspiration to get started? Here are 6 goals we often hear:

• Reduce the call duration
• Do the same work with fewer people
• Improve the quality of service
• Make your customers more self-reliant
• Shorten the training period for new staff
• Make it easier to transfer work

Every service desk employee has valuable knowledge to share. By sharing the knowledge in a knowledge item, you help your colleagues process calls faster and better.

Step 2: Determine the benchmark

Are your goals all set? Then it’s time to determine your benchmarks. The benchmark, or zero measurement, lets you discover how you’re currently doing and where there’s room for improvement. Make sure your benchmarks are based on a good representation of the types of calls you get. For instance, try using all calls you received last year. For each goal you have set in step 1, you determine the baseline:

• Self-reliance: Do you get a lot of the same calls from different customers? Create a knowledge item for the issue and compare the number of related calls before and after you publish your knowledge item.
• Transfer fewer calls from one team to the other: How many calls get transferred from first to second line? Check the numbers and see if they drop when you make more knowledge accessible to first-line operators.
• Fewer calls: Look at the average number of calls per month for each operator team.
• Shorten average duration: Look at the average duration per call for each operator team. Keep in mind that the duration will increase after the initial introduction of KCS, because you’ll need time to create knowledge items for each call you receive.
• Improved customer experience: If you want to measure your customer satisfaction, take a look at the score of your latest customer satisfaction measurement. Haven’t measured your customer satisfaction yet? Get a survey out as soon as possible. Repeat the survey a while after you’ve implemented KCS, when you should start seeing results. Do your users already rate how well you’ve handled their calls? Check your average score on processing calls.

Step 3: Design your KCS process

Next up, determine which process you will follow. Combine your current process with the KCS best practices. There is a standard process for KCS, but that doesn’t mean that you have to follow that process to the letter. Take a look at the KCS process and think about whether you want to make any adjustments. For instance: are there elements from your current notification process that you’d like to incorporate? Adjust the KCS process to suit your organization.

Step 4: Make a template for knowledge items

Make it easy for your team to write good knowledge items: create a template for knowledge items. Templates help your team to create knowledge items more quickly, and you ensure that they register all the necessary information.

How to create a knowledge item template or form? Below you see an example of a filled-in knowledge item. When writing a knowledge item, make sure that you always use your customer’s language. For example, write ‘call’ instead of ‘incident’.

Step 5. Set up your service management tool

Every tool is different, but there are three important steps to take with every tool:

1. Make the knowledge base accessible to the entire team.
   Why? Every service desk employee has knowledge that is valuable to share. By sharing the knowledge in a knowledge item, you help your colleagues process calls faster and better.

2. Allow users to leave a response.
   Feedback on your knowledge items is vital for improving and maintaining your knowledge base. For instance: let customers indicate whether they found your knowledge item useful, and ask them to leave a comment .

3. Set up reports.
   The right reports will help you stay on track with the goals you set. The most important report: how many calls do you solve per month with a knowledge item? This is also the moment to set up reports for the goals you defined in step 1.

Next up: training & coaching your team

You’ve done all the groundwork for implementing KCS. Once you’re done read up on everything you need to know about how to successfully train and coach your team in adopting KCS.

Or check out our Knowledge Management e-book. It contains all kinds of material to help you take your Knowledge Management to the next level. A complete KCS implementation guide, necessary background information on KCS, and a time-saving calculator that helps you make the business case for adopting KCS.

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Overcome knowledge management challenges

Knowledge management is increasingly important to the modern service desk. Sharing knowledge in the team reduces the resolution time massively.

And shifting left and bringing your knowledge directly to the customer will further cut the amount of tickets logged.

The recipe for to overcome knowledge management challenges has two main ingredients: a great Knowledge Base and a dedicated team that is always working on improving it.

Do a service desk-health check

Before you start on the path to knowledge sharing there are a few things you need to find out about your department. Have a look at the percentage of calls that are solved by first line and first time fix and what needs to be escalated.

If you are using a Self-Service Portal, how many calls currently go through it? These stats will help you understand where to put your focus.

Other things to have a look at: How many sources of knowledge do you have? Can users access the knowledge? And most importantly: how many reoccurring tickets do you get? The reoccurring questions are the ones you are primarily battling with your knowledge base, of course.

And don’t forget to consider how prepared your department is for the change. If you are running other huge projects, you should not work on implementing Best Practice Knowledge Management (BPKM) alongside these. It’s a very involved process to implement, and needs priority if you are going ahead with it.

Do a pilot run

To make sure BPKM is right for your department (safe to say it will be!) and to see how it works in practice, start off with a small subset of the team. Make sure they are people that talk a lot to the rest of the team, so that all information about the project is spread quickly.

Hold weekly evaluations and weekly updates during the pilot. Be incredibly transparent and don’t be afraid of showing the complaints. In the end you will see the benefits take the upper hand quickly, even if there are some growing pains!

Train your team

Once you are satisfied with the pilot testing, the first thing you should do is to give the proper preparatory training to your whole team.

Consider not only giving training in your knowledge base tool of choice, but also some writers training. Remember, people don’t get into IT because they are perfect writers and we don’t expect the whole team to become copywriters, but the information needs to be communicated clearly.

Good, averagely written knowledge is better than no knowledge. To reduce the barriers further, you can always create standard templates for your various types of Knowledge Base articles.

As soon as the training needed is completed, make the jump and go live with the process. Why wait? You can have the first article up as soon as the next call comes in and continuously develop the knowledge base from there.

As your knowledge base fills up, every call will take less and less time. An initial time investment will save a lot of time in the long run!

Coach your team

Making sure your team starts using the portal requires both some incentives and some coaching.

You can easily encourage use of the knowledge base with various competitions like “knowledge contributor of the month” or similar incentives.

For coaching, split group into teams – and give each group a coach. Your team members that were in the pilot do well in this role since they are now more experienced knowledge sharers. Make sure your coaches do their best to keep momentum going and listen to feedback from the people they are assigned to. What is working in the knowledge sharing process, and what isn’t?

But don’t also be afraid to be a bit pushy at the start. “Did you enter that solution into the knowledge base?” Some of our customers even use entry of Knowledge Base articles as a performance metric for their staff.

Some things to keep in mind when sharing knowledge

It’s good to know that at the start of the process, there may be a lot more work than usual. That’s because instead of just closing an incident, an operator is now also expected to update a knowledge item before every closure.

The good news though, is that as your knowledge base fills up every call will take less and less time to sort. A bit of initial investment of time in the short run to be able to save a lot of time in the long run!

Better knowledge sharing in your organization

Want more inspiration on sharing knowledge? Download our knowledge management e-book for tips and tricks and a way to calculate your time and cost savings.

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Knowledge Management is a never-ending process; continuous development in your organization means the knowledge base must be constantly updated with new information.

It’s important to regularly measure the health of your knowledge base and your knowledge base KPIs. How do you do this?

How to maintain a healthy Knowledge Base?

By continuously monitoring your Knowledge Base KPIs, you’ll discover which parts of your Knowledge Management process need more attention: make a monthly report of this.

Let’s take TOPdesk as an example. I work at Support here as a technical product consultant, and this is how we do these kind of assessments of the knowledge base.

Has your organisation not yet started with implementing knowledge management?

Is your knowledge base actively used?

There is nothing more annoying than finding old or incorrect information when searching for an answer. That’s why it’s important that the knowledge base contains up-to-date information.

To ensure this, first make sure that all operators actively use the knowledge base. In addition, you want the supporters to actively create new knowledge items and change existing articles. We also zoom in on the level per group of operators / practitioners so that we know which colleagues should receive extra attention.

Measuring the health of your knowledge base (items)

To find out whether the knowledge system is actively used, we perform a number of periodic measurements:

• Number of new knowledge items compared to the total number of knowledge items and total number of reported reports. With this measurement, we check whether new knowledge is being added to the knowledge base.

• Percentage of knowledge items updated in the last months. By comparing this measurement per month, you can see at a glance how up-to-date the knowledge system is.

• Knowledge use percentage per subcategory. This measurement shows which subjects are underexposed in the knowledge system.

• Number of knowledge items that are assessed as useful or not useful. This measurement tells you how end users assess the knowledge. Do they rate your knowledge items as ‘not useful’?

• Percentage of incidents resolved with a new knowledge item compared to older knowledge items. This measurement indicates whether end users find are finding knowledge items. If your percentage is high, then new questions are mostly coming in about new issues. A low percentage tells us end users are not finding existing knowledge items, even though these are already available for a longer time.

Just getting started with targets for your department? These are some service desk KPIs to consider.

Share knowledge better in your organization

Want more inspiration on building better knowledge bases? Download our Knowledge Management e-book for tips and tricks and a way to calculate your time and cost savings.

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What is a good length for a knowledge base article?

No one wants to read a 50 page manual. Make sure your knowledge base articles are as short and to the point as you can make them. A good rule of thumb is that the article should fit “above the fold”. That is to say, you should never have to scroll to read the article.

But be pragmatic. If you need to fit more information, you should. And if everything you need to say is best summarized in three sentences, then let the whole article be three sentences.

Focus on the context of the query in your knowledge base article

We always recommend speaking the language of your end users instead of industry jargon as much as possible. It helps them navigate Self-Service Portals better, and it makes sure they feel like you and them are on the same page. Similarly, it helps them understand your knowledge base articles easier.

The important thing to understand here is you should focus on a solution to the context of the users situation. Not explaining the error codes and how to deal with them. Phrase the problem in a way the user understands “Printer is not working” rather than “printer shows error code 330219”. Bring in technical things like error codes and serial numbers only if you definitely need to.

Make sure your users find the knowledge base articles

And along the same lines – make sure your users can find your knowledge articles. A great thing to do, especially if you have a search functionality in your knowledge base, is to phrase your articles as questions.

This is because people tend to phrase their queries (for example on Google) as questions when they want to find something out. It’s a fun human quirk in how we interact with technology, but one you can put to good use!

Put yourself in the shoes of a user who has the specific problem of what you are writing a knowledge base article for. How would they phrase the question? What keywords would they use? Maybe they would just type “I cannot log in” – then title your knowledge base article just that.

If you have access to search history data in your knowledge base, you can have even have a look and see what the most common phrasings of a certain query are – and how often it crops up.

Consider different levels of experience in solving problems

One good thing to do is to also let your users know what is required from them to solve a problem themselves. A way to do this is to have an indicator at the top of the page that tells the reader how in-depth the procedure is. This could be either a numerical 1-5 type value, or a plain text “intermediate” or “easy”.

These types of indicators are also useful if you need to write a lot of instructions that aren’t actually that complicated. If you reassure people who are faced with a “wall-of-text” that the information is not as complicated as it may look, you can encourage them to actually engage with the text.

Better knowledge sharing in your organization

Want more inspiration on sharing knowledge? Download our Knowledge Management e-book for tips and tricks on knowledge bases, and a way to calculate your time and cost savings.

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