Template · Knowledge Management
Knowledge Management: Templates
Four working templates: the decision record, the lesson learned, the quarterly retirement pass and the departure capture.
Markdown. No sign-up, no email.
1. Decision record#
Within 24 hours. Drafted by an agent, confirmed by whoever decided.
| Field | Entry |
|---|---|
| Decision | |
| Date and decider | [A name] |
| Context | [What forced the question now. Reconstructed later, this row is always wrong] |
| Options considered | [At least two] |
| Rejected, and why | [The most valuable row. It stops the debate recurring and tells a future reader this was chosen rather than defaulted into] |
| Chosen, and why | |
| Consequences accepted | [What this makes harder. Every choice makes something harder] |
| Revisit when | [A condition, not a date] |
| Owner and review date |
2. Lesson learned#
| Field | Entry |
|---|---|
| What happened | [Plainly] |
| What we expected | [The gap between these two is the lesson] |
| Why the difference | [Cause, not blame] |
| What we will do differently | [Specific enough to be checkable. "Be more careful" is not a lesson] |
| Who needs to know | |
| Where this is now written down | [If nowhere, the lesson is not learned, it is remembered, and only by whoever was there] |
| Owner and review date |
3. Quarterly retirement pass#
The most important and least popular procedure here.
| Document | Last reviewed | Still true? | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| [Confirm / Update / Retire / Merge] |
| Summary | |
|---|---|
| Documents reviewed | |
| Retired | [A zero here means the pass did not happen. The base is now three months staler] |
| Merged, resolving a duplicate authority | |
| Referencing systems that no longer exist | [Retire these first. They are the most confidently wrong] |
| Median age at last review, after this pass |
4. Departure capture#
Run in the first week of a notice period, never the last.
| Field | Entry |
|---|---|
| Person and role | |
| Systems only they understand | [The single-point-of-failure list, and the reason to start early] |
| Clients they hold the context for | [History, constraints, personalities, what was promised] |
| Why things are the way they are | [The reasoning that lives in no document. The most valuable row on this page] |
| Workarounds and undocumented behaviour | [Every system has some. They are never written down] |
| In-flight commitments | [Including anything promised verbally] |
| Who could take each item | |
| Captured by, and date |
Left to the final week, this becomes a meeting where someone lists file locations, and everything worth keeping walks out of the door.
Using these together#
The charter sets out what this function owns, the SOPs say when each is produced, the KPIs define what the retirement pass feeds, and the workflows name who receives each output. A decision record with a blank rejected-options row will not stop the argument it was written to end.