Knowledge management at Registers of Scotland

Background

Registers of Scotland use Confluence server to document, design, and manage IT project work. With growing content and an increasing number of users, it was becoming more difficult and time consuming to find relevant information.

The Challenge

We were tasked with providing advice and best practices on how content should be managed and maintained in Confluence, so that team members could find the information they needed, seamlessly and easily.

With over 100 Confluence spaces, our first hurdle was to analyse and understand how a huge volume of content was currently authored and managed.

Our next challenge was to provide a recommendation that fulfilled the needs of a diverse set of over 200 users across multiple teams and departments.

The Solution

An extensive review of project activity and content in Confluence was carried out to inform our recommendation. We focused on naming conventions, labels, space architecture, access privileges, page hierarchies, and content.

Our solution had to fit a large organisation where individuals worked cross-team and cross-department. Our recommendations included:

• establishing a space for each department and team;
• establishing a space for each major cross-team project (e.g. a product, service, or campaign);
• using space categories to find related spaces in the space directory;
• using the Refined Theme for Confluence add-on to adjust the site’s look and feel, and establish navigational aids such as hierarchical menus;
• guidelines on how best to use macros, formatting, templates, blueprints, and dashboards.

Recommended actions to improve performance have already been carried out by Registers of Scotland, and we believe that 2017 will see a significant reconfiguration of the site.

Categories: Agile

Technologies: Confluence