Structuring institutional knowledge for a support team

A live knowledge base the email workstream now reaches for instead of asking a colleague or digging through stale Word documents — four months on, still iterating. It matters because team knowledge used to leave when people did.

It started as notes to my future self

The constraints set the shape. SharePoint offers a fixed block palette, and a live page’s name can’t change without breaking every link into it — so names had to be right at launch. One author, a supervisor review gate, few hours once it shipped, and a reader who is an agent at 09:03 with a full inbox and a wide spread of experience across the team.

Names, ownership, and progressive disclosure

Three moves carry it. Ownership first: every page belongs to one hub, and if it’s linked from your hub, you own it — link, never duplicate, so a living system can’t fork into contradictions. Names are outcomes, not labels: filename, heading, and search description are written against the four things agents do — browse, bookmark, search, orient. And disclosure is laddered: a page opens with what’s needed first and holds the rest a layer down, clear of someone moving fast.

A working mode, filed as a topic

Fast, informal replies lived under ‘templates’ as if they were a subject — but agents are inthat mode, they don’t browse to it, and Kat missed it unprompted in the first test. The fix became a rule, not a patch: that work gets its own tier, and a token marks an audience or working context, never a topic. A phone agent’s flag extended it team-wide. Heard in February, shipped in June — scarce hours, spent when they freed up.

Removing the correct answer

The path’s destination, up close. A technically-correct nuance about direct-debit cut-offs — true, useful to an expert — was cut, because an agent misreading it mid-run could cancel a supporter’s donation on the wrong day. Baseline confidence beats conditional complexity when the reader is time-pressed and the failure mode is someone’s money.

Not welded to the tools that built it

Built with markdown, Git, and Claude Code for iteration speed. When the organisation standardised on Copilot, the workflow adapted and the pages didn’t notice.

What testing showed

One browse-first agent, one search-first — sampled on purpose — with full transcripts and a self-built transcription pipeline (one clause, not a showcase). What pushed back matters as much as what confirmed: one finding became the beat above; another is still an open loop.

Adopted before it was mandated

Adoption preceded the mandate — the pattern replicated before the project was formal, and it’s still in use and still changing. Live metrics are thin by design: no baseline was captured before rollout, and that’s named, not hidden. The frame is a north star with proxies — questions resolved without interrupting a colleague, read through first-resort behaviour, time-to-answer, and where new starters go first.

What it taught

Structure teaches behaviour. The knowledge base works in the moments a page’s name, shape, and omissions make the right action obvious to someone with no time to hunt. Everything else serves that.