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Using Confluence for knowledge management: our 7 best practices
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Using Confluence for knowledge management: our 7 best practices
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What is knowledge management?
Why use Confluence for knowledge management?
How to use Confluence for knowledge management
- 1. Plan your content
- 2. Save time with templates
- 3. Organise by topic
- 4. Manage user access
- 5. Measure engagement
- 6. Arrange pages into guides
- 7. Get everyone involved
How Mosaic improves your Confluence KMS
Sharing knowledge has never been easier. We reveal our top tips for creating a better knowledge management system (KMS) in Confluence.
Effective knowledge management means faster innovation, better team collaboration, and improved business performance. With knowledge workers sharing and categorising files and information, decision-makers are more equipped to make impactful decisions that affect the bottom line, and staff are empowered to learn, grow, and develop, which only contributes to better business performance.
There’s no use gatekeeping content: secrecy has no place in business success. Keep reading to learn the best practices for knowledge management in Confluence and preserve institutional memory.
There’s no use gatekeeping content: secrecy has no place in business success. Keep reading to learn the best practices for knowledge management in Confluence and preserve institutional memory.
What is knowledge management?
Knowledge management is a process that involves creating, organising, and sharing knowledge within an organisation. By collating internal knowledge, you help others learn new things quickly and make accessing the information they need easy.
Let’s say you have a new member of staff starting; instead of letting them figure things out on their own or spending hours answering their specific questions, they can take a self-guided tour around your knowledge base where they can easily access onboarding documentation, including annual leave policies, branding guidelines, and more. Helping them settle in quicker and get acquainted with your business operations.
Why use Confluence for knowledge management?
To create a comprehensive knowledge management system (KMS), you’ll need to identify, organise, and share your knowledge. You can do all this easily from within Confluence, making managing and maintaining your knowledge superbly easy.
Confluence is a centralised information repository with collaboration and teamwork at its core. It allows everyone to read and contribute to the documentation. This not only means there's a single source of truth to which you can direct people, but also that when information needs updating, it's easy to do so.
With dedicated spaces and collaboration features, Confluence is ideal for knowledge management
Confluence is powerful on its own, but it's designed to work seamlessly with your other Atlassian tools like Jira or Trello. It also integrates with third-party plugins, allowing you to bring additional context to your pages without requiring users to leave your space.
How to use Confluence for knowledge management
We recommend creating a Confluence knowledge base, but these best practices apply to any type of documentation you keep in Confluence.
1. Plan out your Confluence content
Before you start with Confluence, you should hone in on the audience. Who is your content for? Your audience could target company employees or external customers. Figuring this out helps you map out what content you need and from whom.
2. Save time by using Confluence templates
Instead of starting from scratch, you can save huge amounts of time and effort by customising a Confluence template. Start with a built-in page template from Atlassian, or choose from a branded, visual template that's sure to engage your users.
3. Organise your knowledge by topic or theme
Don’t forget to organise your content in a clear hierarchy of pages. This makes it easier for users to navigate through your content, finding the right content they need at that moment. So if your knowledge base or documentation is for new starters, you might want to group sections based on departmental procedures, general employee policies, FAQ section, induction checklists, etc.
Learn more: Top tips for organising Confluence pages
4. Manage who can access your knowledge
Add users and set user permissions across the spaces you’ve created in Confluence. You can also invite users through integrated platforms like Slack or Trello. By making your knowledge visible to all team members, you encourage a more transparent, communicative working environment.
5. Measure user engagement
It’s important to know whether users are actually engaging with your pages. One way to measure activity is by using Confluence Analytics. This helps you monitor page views, page activity, and site searches, helping you quickly identify pages that aren’t utilised and roll out improvements where needed.
Track user activity and engagement with Confluence Analytics
6. Arrange your pages into user-friendly guides
You want to create content that’s not just used, but adds real value to its users. That means making knowledge easy for users to navigate. With Guided Pathways for Confluence, you can even create handy step-by-step guides from your Confluence pages, which makes finding answers almost effortless.
7. Get all your users involved
Finally, encourage contribution from all team members. Confluence allows for collaborative editing and commenting. Make sure your team knows how to use these features and encourage them to contribute their knowledge.
How can Mosaic: Content Formatting Macros & Templates improve my Confluence KMS?
When you have a lot of information stored on your pages, we recommend making your pages easier to scan and navigate. This is where Mosaic comes in.
Mosaic's range of helpful macros, such as Tabs, Buttons, and Backgrounds, help you go beyond bland page layouts to add structure and interactivity to your page. If you're stuck for inspiration, it also comes with a range of templates to get you set up quicker.
Mosaic makes your Confluence KMS visually engaging and easy to navigate
With Mosaic, there's no risk of your Confluence pages becoming boring walls of text. By making your content interactive and visually coherent, you will encourage users to self-service.
Building a culture of shared knowledge
Introducing knowledge management can be met with resistance - in some cases, you’ll be asking employees to change their way of thinking and working. But sharing internal knowledge is essential. It helps you boost team productivity, improve innovation, and encourage effortless employee training and development.
And guess what, it can even help you save money! Knowledge management done well can cut down on training and development costs. So, take the time to harness this new environment and embrace knowledge-sharing processes because it may well transform how you compete in your respective markets.
By implementing Confluence as your KMS, you can break down silos, improve decision making, and turn tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge that everyone can access.
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