Monzonaut AMA - Jen - Knowledge Management Lead šŸ“š

I never came across Ocelot in my time in gov, but Iā€™m sure the support teamsā€™ needs are very similar.

My time was mostly spent helping other engineers across the civil service understand how to use the tools and platforms that GDS built. And in a meta way, also how to handle their own documentation. We ended up building our own tech stack for docs using a ā€˜docs as codeā€™ approach. Hereā€™s an old blog post I wrote about it a few years ago.

At Monzo we have an off-the-shelf product for COps knowledge that only contains information relevant for COps. It makes it a lot easier for them to find the information they need as itā€™s designed with them in mind from the very start.

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Not at all :smiling_face: Itā€™s lovely to be chatting to you all. Shoutout to the brilliant @AlanDoe for suggesting this AMA.

Iā€™m usually lurking on here looking for blog post inspiration. Any ideas most welcome!

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I was going to ask how do you make Monzonauts (with emphasis on those that donā€™t work in technical operations) actually read the documentation, but this is answered - in part at least - in a reply further down.

My own personal experience with this kind of thing is where I am at the moment Iā€™ve built pages in Confluence that cover specific topics that come up repeatedly - Slack, tickets, whatever. I spend ages building the pages. I include screenshots. I keep the language simple and with as little technical jargon as possible. I cover different situations and how to deal with them. But then, on Slack usually, Iā€™m bombarded with the same questions over and over again despite everything thatā€™s been done to promote the documentation.

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Thatā€™s a tough situation. Iā€™ve been there! It sounds like youā€™ve put a lot of effort into creating these docs so it might be useful to investigate further. I donā€™t know if you want advice, but if you do, Iā€™ve put some thoughts below.

Have you asked these folks why they donā€™t check the docs first? Do they know the docs exist? Can they find them? When they find them, can they quickly find the thing they need? Do they trust the information in those docs enough to base decisions on? If the answer to any of these is no, you have a place to start.

If the answer to all these is yes, thatā€™s great, youā€™ve got some good content on your hands. For your docs to be successful, they have to be better (faster?) than the alternative route of asking you for help. My assumption here is that your colleagues like that route because youā€™re a helpful person and it gets them a quick response. Do you always help them straight away? Do you point them at the docs first and only give them answers not covered by the docs? Do you do this in an open Slack channel rather than private messages? If people see that the docs are there, helping others, and that you wonā€™t help someone until theyā€™ve consulted the docs first, it can nudge them to do the same.

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Thanks @jenwilkinson for your comprehensive and insightful answers! A lot to mull over :smile:.

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Hi Ben! Apologies I missed your question earlier in the week. This is a good question. Our data protection and data governance teams look after much of this. We have a bunch of processes and tools in place, but itā€™s something weā€™re always improving.

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Thanks for the great questions. As you can probably tell, I love to chat about this stuff :smile:

Feel free to keep firing questions over!

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:rotating_light: Today is the last day to ask @jenwilkinson questions :rotating_light:

Although I feel we could convince her to stick around and maybe we need to look into something like a ā€œRequest a blogā€ kind of Topic for future :thinking:

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