Archivathon initiative
Annual documentation cleanup event
My first month was a crash course in our team's many products and services. I started by diving into the team's Confluence space, expecting a detailed knowledge base of our offerings. Instead, I found an abandoned archive with no clear strategy. Outdated articles, missing context, and dead links meant even newer entries felt unreliable.
As my first order of business, I channeled my inner Marie Kondo and proposed a team "Archivathon":
Tidying Up and Sparking Joy:
Declutter: We'd purge old documents, archive deprecated products, and identify articles needing updates.
Define Our Principles: We'd create clear standards for documenting and organizing technical guides, and agree to share ownership and accountability for ongoing maintenance.
Spring Clean Every Year: Annual "Archivathons" would refresh our commitment to the standards we set, tweak our policies as needed, and declutter the past year's knowledge.
We asked ourselves: "Who reads this?" and "What's asked of us most frequently?" then defined what and how to document, streamlined with templates, implemented versioning, updated documents, and synced everything with our IT retention policy.
Sharing the Spark:
After our first Archivathon, I presented our strategy to the broader engineering and product teams. The response was contagious. Our fast-growing data platform and finance teams adopted the strategy, boosting their efficiency and improving cross-team knowledge sharing.
Impact Beyond Tidying:
My initial confusion evolved into an organization-wide movement. We transformed a chaotic knowledge base into a reliable resource, boosting efficiency, communication, and collaboration across teams. Now, finding the right information feels less like navigating a cluttered desk drawer and more like enjoying a beautifully organized library.