knowledge-ops

knowledge-ops

Company SOP + internal runbook authoring, 5W2H completeness validation, and KB hygiene reporting for Head-of-Ops / Knowledge-Manager / TPM-Internal personas.

Purpose

An ops organization three years in accumulates a sprawl: 600 Notion pages, 200 Confluence runbooks, three Obsidian vaults, a Drive/SOPs/ folder, and a Slack #ops-questions channel that exists because nobody can find the canonical doc. Predictable failure modes:

1. No owner — 40% of SOPs name "the team" instead of a person. When the doc rots, nobody is accountable.
2. No last-reviewed date — a years-old vendor-offboarding SOP still references a procurement tool that was sunset over a year ago.
3. Vague success signals — runbook step 4 says "verify the service is up". A new operator can't tell what that means.
4. No rollback path — incident-comms cascade runbook tells you how to send the alert. It doesn't tell you how to retract it when the alert was wrong.
5. Orphan pages — half the KB has no inbound links. Nobody finds them via navigation; they only exist because somebody knew the URL.
6. Glossary drift — "CSM" means Customer Success Manager in three docs and Customer Solutions Manager in five. New hires guess wrong for six months.
7. Happy-path-only SOPs — the doc covers what happens when everything works. It doesn't cover the 30% case where it doesn't.

This skill answers the operator's actual question: "Which 20 docs do I fix first, and what specifically is wrong with each?" — with deterministic logic, not intuition.

When to use

• Authoring a new SOP for a cross-functional company process (procurement intake, vendor offboarding, incident-comms cascade, employee onboarding, expense reimbursement, customer-escalation playbook, security-incident comms, system-access provisioning).
• Validating an existing internal runbook before it goes into rotation (every step must have a named owner, expected duration, observable success signal, observable failure signal, rollback path, escalation contact).
• Ingesting a multi-document KB export (Notion zip, Confluence space export, Obsidian vault, Drive/SOPs/ directory) and surfacing what's broken: orphan pages, stale pages (no edit > 12 months), glossary drift, missing-owner pages, cross-link map.
• Onboarding a new ops hire by generating the SOPs and ops-handbook pages they need to read in week 1.
• Wiki cleanup sprints — quarterly hygiene work where the org decides which 30 docs to archive, rewrite, or merge.