Knowledgeable

Opportunity

OGP officers waste time hunting for basic workplace information like claims procedures, HR policies, and performance guidelines. The problem? As the organisation has grown, information has become scattered across different platforms, and is sometimes duplicated or outdated. Additionally, information is currently categorised by team/function (e.g. HR, Finance) rather than the context of a person looking for information, so officers have to know exactly where to start looking.

This friction affects everyone from new joiners navigating their first few weeks, to experienced officers looking for specific policies, and also prevents tools like Notion AI from working effectively.

We felt it was important for information to be easily accessible to OGP officers from Day 1 of their journey, so that's where we began. We interviewed a cross-section of colleagues (n=8) who've been at OGP for different lengths of time (<1 month, 3-6 months, >1 year), to collect feedback on our existing knowledge bases, and understand what an improved solution could look like.

Velocity

We started with a content audit of our HR and Finance knowledge bases (because they're policy-heavy and are used by officers across the organisation), to identify instances of broken navigation, as well as duplicate, conflicting, and potentially outdated information.

The next step was to restructure and rewrite information from these knowledge bases to make them more useful for our prototype. In our initial user testing, participants suggested and indicated a preference for a chronological structure of information, which would be relevant to them at a specific point in time. In other words, there was information that would have been of greater value to them if they had come across it earlier in their time at OGP. So when rewriting, we decided to restructure information into three broad sections:

1. Onboarding: The basics of getting started at OGP, such as our mission, values, foundations, culture, and ways of working within the organisation.

2. Navigating Government 101: Understanding structures, stakeholders, and the wider context of OGP – especially helpful for officers new to the public service.

3. Being an employee: For the day-to-day, covering things like HR policies (e.g. leave, compensation & benefits, medical, learning budgets), working norms (e.g. performance, hiring) and social activities (interest groups, team events).

These are structured such that a newly hired officer can easily read through the Onboarding and Navigating Government 101 sections in their first 1-3 months at OGP to help them get settled in, while the Being an employee section contains general reference material that's applicable to anyone regardless of tenure.

This structure allows for ease of finding information when it's needed, since it's no longer in function-specific silos. The long-term goal is to migrate detailed information from other teams (e.g. Finance and Workplace) into the new structure, so officers have a more holistic knowledge base to search through.

Traction

With the new page structure, we're ready to test this with a small group to understand if it's easier to navigate, and if information is easier to find. Once we've collected and incorporated further feedback, we can make this available to the wider organisation.

We're acutely aware that this isn't a one-time effort, and are also thinking about the sustainability and maintenance of this as a long-term solution. It's a long road ahead, but we had to start somewhere, and there's really no better time than Hackathon – we'll update this page as and when we have any progress to report on this!