Documenting Procedures to Preserve Your Organisation’s Memory

The accountant retires, the admissions officer changes roles, the network technician resigns: and with them go years of know-how that was never written down. Documenting procedures is not administrative busywork; it is insurance against forgetting. Here is how to do it without turning your team into an archive department.

The hidden cost of information nobody can find

Searching for information someone already has comes at a real cost. Back in 2012, the McKinsey Global Institute’s report The social economy estimated that “interaction workers” spent nearly 20% of their week looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues who could help. Ten years later, APQC, a reference body in knowledge management, reached a similar conclusion: according to research it published in 2022, the average knowledge worker spends 8.2 hours a week looking for, recreating or duplicating information, including about 2 hours redoing work that already exists.

These studies mostly cover large companies, but the mechanism is universal. In a school, an NGO or a small business, knowledge often lives in a few heads and a few binders. When a key person is absent or leaves, the organisation discovers what it did not know it knew.

What you really need to document

Writing everything down is impossible and pointless. Focus on what is expensive to lose:

• Recurring procedures: month-end closing, enrolling a student, onboarding a new hire, backing up data.
• Registers and decisions: why a supplier was chosen, what was decided in a meeting, who approved what.
• Activity logs: incidents, technical interventions, follow-up of sensitive files.
• Contacts and access: who to call for what, where reference documents are kept (never write passwords in plain text).
• Tacit knowledge: the tricks of a job, which are often only discovered when the person leaves.

A recognised approach: take a cue from ISO 30401

The international standard ISO 30401:2018 sets the requirements for a knowledge management system, whatever the size of the organisation. You do not need to aim for certification to adopt its spirit: knowledge is managed as an ongoing process (identify, create, share, reuse, update), with clear roles and a culture that values sharing. The standard is currently under revision, a sign that the topic remains very much alive.

APQC also noted in a 2021 analysis that a large share of the leaders it surveyed see the inability to find information as a major drain on productivity, especially when employees have to search many different places. The lesson is simple: one well-organised place beats ten shared folders.

Building team memory in 7 steps

1. List critical knowledge. Ask each manager: “If you left tomorrow, what would grind to a halt?”
2. Create one space per team or project, with suitable access rights: not everyone needs to see everything.
3. Adopt templates: a procedure always follows the same structure (purpose, owner, steps, watch-outs, last updated).
4. Write together. The person who knows the task drafts it; a colleague reviews and tests it.
5. Link notes to each other instead of duplicating: a procedure points to the relevant register or contact.
6. Schedule an update routine, for example at the end of each quarter or after every incident.
7. Make it part of handover whenever someone leaves: the notes for their role are reviewed before their last day.

How SciAut Notes helps

SciAut Notes is the documentation and memory tool of the SciAut Suite, built for teams and teachers. Its features map directly onto the approach above:

• Workspaces per team or project, with roles and access rights.
• Structured notes: tree structure, properties and links between notes, to connect procedures, registers and contacts.
• Note types: procedures, registers, logs and tracking boards, ready to use.
• Real-time co-editing: several people can write on the same note at the same time, ideal for a handover.
• Search: full-text search and a command palette to find anything in seconds.
• Offline and encryption: work without a connection and end-to-end encrypted spaces for sensitive information.

Offline work is a real advantage where connectivity is unreliable: you document in the field and synchronisation follows.

Conclusion

Organisational memory cannot be decreed: it is built note by note, with a tool people actually want to open. Start with the three procedures you would miss most tomorrow, then expand. Discover SciAut Notes and request a demo for your team.

Sources

• KM Makes Knowledge Workers More Productive and Less Stressed Out — APQC, 2022
• It’s Time for KM to Fix Findability — APQC, 2021
• The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies — McKinsey Global Institute, 2012
• ISO 30401:2018 Knowledge management systems — Requirements — ISO, 2018