Find and audit what exists

Start with your version-one question list. For each question, find the document that answers it. You will find three kinds: documents that exist and are right; documents that exist and are out of date, wrong or contradicted by another document; and nothing at all.

The second kind is the dangerous one. An assistant reading two policies that disagree will pick one, confidently. So the audit is not just collection; it is correction. For every document, check the date, check it against how things actually work now, and fix or retire it. If two documents cover the same thing, keep one.

This is tedious. It is also the most valuable thing in the course, because you are fixing the reason people ask you instead of reading the documents: the documents cannot be trusted. After the audit, they can.

In practice. A knowledge manager found four versions of the same onboarding checklist in three folders, with different steps. Nobody knew which was current, which was why every new manager asked her. She merged them into one, dated it, deleted the others, and the question stopped.

At your desk. For each version-one question, find its document. Mark each as current, needs fixing, or missing. Fix or retire the second group. Put the current set in one folder.

Write it down.

• Documents found
• fixed
• missing:
• The worst contradiction I found:
• Where the current set now lives: