Knowledge Management: SOPs
Six procedures covering capture at the point of work, the one-authority rule, the quarterly retirement pass, agent context review and departure capture.
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SOP 1: Capture at the point of work#
Run: within 24 hours of a decision, incident or lesson.
The agent drafts from the meeting, thread or postmortem; the owner corrects and confirms.
Twenty-four hours, because reasoning decays faster than facts. A retrospective written a month later records the story people have settled on rather than the reasoning that was actually used, and the reasoning is the valuable part.
SOP 2: The one-authority rule#
Run: on every new document.
A new document on an existing topic either replaces the current one or does not ship. There is no third option, and the third option is what every knowledge base actually does.
When two documents conflict, a person decides which is authoritative. The other is marked superseded with a pointer forward, so an old link teaches instead of misleading.
SOP 3: Review dates#
Run: on everything.
Every document carries an owner and a review date. A document with no review date is treated as expired, which sounds harsh and is the only rule that works.
Review means re-reading. Re-dating without reading is the most common way a knowledge base becomes confidently wrong.
SOP 4: The quarterly retirement pass#
Run: quarterly. The most important procedure here and the least popular.
- Everything past its review date: confirm, update, or retire.
- Everything referencing a system that no longer exists: retire.
- Everything nobody has opened in a year: probably retire, and ask why it was written.
- Supersede, never delete. The old version stays reachable with a pointer forward.
Target: a non-zero number of retirements every quarter. A pass that removes nothing did not happen, and the base is now three months staler than it was.
SOP 5: Agent context review#
Run: quarterly.
What each agent is given to read, and what in that bundle has never influenced an output.
This is the highest-consequence text in the company: it shapes every output every agent produces. It also grows silently, because adding a document to a context feels free and nobody ever removes one.
SOP 6: Departure capture#
Run: on every notice period, in the first week rather than the last.
| Capture | Specifically |
|---|---|
| What only they know | Systems, clients, history, workarounds |
| Why things are the way they are | The reasoning that is not in any document |
| Who else could do this | The single-point-of-failure list |
| In-flight commitments | Including anything promised verbally |
Run in the first week of a notice period. Left to the last, it becomes a handover meeting where someone lists file locations, and everything valuable walks out of the door.
Escalation#
| Situation | Goes to |
|---|---|
| Two current documents on one topic | Named owner decides within a week |
| A critical system documented by nobody | CTO and the workforce plan |
| A quarterly retirement pass with zero retirements | Knowledge lead. The pass did not happen |
| An agent acting on a superseded document | Treat as an incident. This is the failure mode of the whole function |