Said It Here

Why does team documentation always go out of date?

Writing documentation by hand never actually happens on busy teams, leaving knowledge bases disjointed and unhelpful. Because fixes for unusual problems are rarely written down, new hires end up wasting time solving the exact same issues from scratch six months later.

What people tried

Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.

  1. 1
    Using SharePoint Lists feeding a Copilot agent
  2. 2
    Relying on vendor knowledge bases and RMM documentation stores
  3. 3
    Using in-house built AI agents to correct documentation drift or generate new KB articles from chat transcripts and tickets
  4. 4
    Relying on ticket history as documentation
  5. 5
    Holding regular team meetings to discuss lingering open tickets and share approaches
  6. 6
    Using AI-accessible ticketing systems as a searchable source of truth
  7. 7
    Writing notes while performing the task and adding items to a project board

In their words

Unedited, most upvoted first, each linked to the thread it came from.

Our KBs are disjointed, out of date and not always helpful. I want to fix this but I don’t know where to start!source ↗

almuses · r/msp · 11 upvotes

Every team I talk to has the same issue: someone fixes a weird issue once, then it's never documented, so six months later a new hire hits the same thing and has to resolve it from scratch.source ↗

writing docs by hand never actually happens on my own team.source ↗

KimbobSwimbob · r/sysadmin

Where this came up

People with this problem also raised