How do you set up your Knowledge Base?

I am creating a Knowledge Base for my fundraising team and wanted to gather thoughts from others about how they set up theirs. A few questions I'm running into:

1. Automation rules - Are they used in your Knowledge Base? How are they used?

2. Organizational Structure - What is your folder structure like? How do you breakdown different resources?

3. Wrike Trainings - What training resources from Wrike have you found most helpful to provide?

4. Onboarding new team members - Do you create action steps for new members joining your Wrike spaces? What are those steps?

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Ali Moses

Hi @Jessa Mae Schnacke-Ayunon, My knowledge base is actually available as a template in the community template section when you go to create a new space. It includes automations to create new articles and sub-articles using status changes. In our company, we gave each department their own knowledge base within the company knowledge base as a whole. This is so that they can use search or copilot to query within only their department or the KB as a whole. KB training materials are included in the template to teach best practices as well as the basics of how to use the KB.

Sherrie Besecker

This is how we organize our knowledge base - the key here is that these are also cross linked into our other central teams channel, and intranet - so that everything is connected! The best training you can offer your teams is anything in Wrike Discover - I have hand picked some for our expert teams, as well as I sprinkle those into our Core Training Classes (101 Basic, PM training Etc)

Anna Giacobbe

1. Automation rules - Are they used in your Knowledge Base? How are they used?

Personally, we don't use any automation rules in our Knowledge Base as we use this as a bank of resources an there's no "new work" coming through it (other than new articles, etc.).

2. Organizational Structure - What is your folder structure like? How do you breakdown different resources?

We actually have a Knowledge Base folder in each team's Space. That way, they see the knowledge base that is more relevant for them and if there are posts that are applicable to more than one team, it can be cross-tagged!
We also use a naming convention per team so that the folders aren't all just called "Knowledge Base". We append the team acronym in [square brackets].

3. Wrike Trainings - What training resources from Wrike have you found most helpful to provide?

For new Collaborators, we send them a welcome email with a link to this short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ks9d-8ZGIDk
For new Regular users, we created a Wrike onboarding project that has a task per learning plan module (we trigger this from a simple form that's avail to just me/my intern on Marketing Ops):
a) The Beginner: The Beginner (mandatory for all)
b) The Individual: The Individual (mandatory for all)
c) The Champion: The Champion (optional - if they are their team's champion and need more knowledge on things like blueprints and request forms)
d) The Leader: The Leader (optional - if they are a manager, team lead, etc.)
In either case (Collaborator or Regular), we share links to the Community and Help Center as resources, as well as our internal Wiki and our contact info on Marketing Ops

4. Onboarding new team members - Do you create action steps for new members joining your Wrike spaces? What are those steps?

We have an overall Marketing 101 onboarding that was created in collaboration with all subteams and leaders. We collected all the onboarding resources that each team had, deduped the content, and kept the main/common pieces as our "core" onboarding material and anything that was more role- or team-specific we created as add-on tasks/modules. We made a blueprint for this that included tasks with different topics (know the office, know the company, learn tone of voice, HR trainings to complete, account set-ups, etc.) and individual blueprint tasks for the role-/team-specific topics. We bundled this in a request form that triggers the main blueprint, and adds on any additional add-on modules.

Danielle Wilson

We don't have a lot of complicated automation rules. We have 1 that triggers a change in project status (which allows us to capture a % of revenue). Another that sends an @ mention to different team members when a bug has been fixed and needs review.

Folder structure: We work with a number of different clients and each client has a few different projects. Each client has a folder and in that are either the Won projects or those still in discussion. Each project folder has a project and an "admin folder" with the scope, budget sheet and reference materials. Once the project is completed, we move that project to the client folder in the zz archive folder. We only use 1 space for client work since the workload view for resources is per space.

Trainings: I tend to watch all of the webinars on new features so that I can share it with the team. I also find the Wrike community helpful and when I can't find an answer, I either ask submit a request or as a question in the community. We don't really use our knowledge base space since we are pretty small.

Onboarding: We are pretty small, so when someone new joins, I or one of the other Wrike admins walk them through it personally explaining the project views, the workload view or dashboards.

Renee James

I actually created by OWN dashboard and 7 lessons (with PPTs). Then I created short videos to help them understand the basics. I also aggregated great Wrike Videos in the appropriate sections. I have been told by my team that this has been invaluable for onboarding.

Here is an example of a few of the longer Mandatory Videos I created/produced for our marketing team... on our new Intake Process and Default Dashboard
New Intake Process

Default Dashboard

Christy Flater

The suggestions I would give you are not necessarily Wrike specific, but overall what to keep in mind.

When we are implementing something new, like a knowledge base in Wrike, we ask a trusted stakeholder that can give us feedback as we are setting up and testing the new space. Project managers are really great in coming up with systems and repositories like this, but if it is not what other members of the team will use or too far from tools that have been used before, then you could possibly build a beautiful mansion that no one lives in. It's finding the harmony in setting it up to use quickly along with change management and product management and work in iterations when implementing something new for a team.

Along with that I would say the most important automations are maintenance reminders that automatically notify content owners when a page or folder hasn’t been updated in X months to ensure the knowledge base is accurate and current.

Best wishes!

Kevin Thalacker

I like all the sharing and now have great ideas to help improve our knowledge base. We have a Space that we share with all of our users plus assign trainings.

John Egleston

You all are a wealth of...knowledge! I especially appreciate @Sherrie Besecker's connecting everything at a high level so search serves everyone.

While our org doesn't use Wrike for its internal knowledge management, here's some of what I've learned from managing the product we use. We can also learn from the established discipline of Knowledge Centered Service/Support (KCS).

Keep it digestibly bite-sized. Divide longer articles into brief sections or sub-articles.

Include options for feedback. Continuously improve based on comments and corrections from end users to the authoring team, and make a clear path for SMEs to submit new content.

Sustainably illustrate with embedded images. Crop right-sized screenshots closely, annotate key details, and store editable versions alongside other draft content.

Know when a downloadable file is really needed. PDFs aren't usually mobile-friendly or searchable, but can help when a simple visual design is needed to communicate beyond rich text. Locked Word files can be more mobile-friendly where extensive detail is required.

Devree Czupinski

We are building a department specific knowledge base within our department's space right now!

We aren't using any automations currently, but might in the future (things like when a new item is created, add an approval for a manager to review before releasing it as ready)
We created a custom item type for "Knowledge Articles" and a custom field called "Knowledge Tags" (e.g. Databases, Software, Fix an Issue, General Knowledge) to categorize each item
We have a table view set up that is grouped by the knowledge tag (an item can have more than one tag), but users can easily find the article based on the knowledge they are seeking
We have a workflow set up to outline if the info is ready, under construction, temporary, or outdated

Tom Halbert

We have only just started looking into the knowledge base setup now. Will enjoy reading all the responses coming in.
Our current setup will be improved once we implement this.
1. No automatic rules yet
2. Our current KB folder structure is setup into IT, Parents and Staff & students. It will get larger as we develop.
3. Best training have been the beginners videos to start with and then the functionality updates moving forward
4. Onboarding needs to be further worked on. We do on the job training and onboarding with plenty of notes. We mainly use an internal wiki for these but starting to utilise Wrike for some areas.

Looking forward to reading other responses and get ideas from others more advanced in the Wrike usage

Penny Blotsky

This is amazing! I'm loving the ideas. I haven't started a Knowledge Base yet, but it's been on my to-do to figure out the best way to utilize this. We are a small group as well, but for onboarding and sharing best practices, etc I think it will be amazing. Thank you for sharing your ideas!!