Keeping it alive

Keeping it alive

Reviewing everything is the same as reviewing nothing, because nobody has time for it, so it quietly stops.
  • Every page has an owner, and it is the role that does the work the page describes.
  • Verification and review dates go only on pages where being wrong costs money or breaks the law: payroll, contracts, safety, data protection, anything a regulator or funder could ask about.
  • Everything else gets fixed when someone notices it is wrong, by whoever notices.
  • Once a year, look at what nobody has opened and delete it. An abandoned page is a small lie about what your organization knows.
The trap to avoid is appointing someone to keep the knowledge base current. It sounds responsible and it fails within a quarter, because that person cannot know what changed in forty areas of work. Distributed ownership is not the lazy option, it is the one that survives.

Your variation

Which pages you put under formal verification is genuinely organization-specific. List them.