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 2023 vendor-offboarding SOP still references a procurement tool sunset in 2024.
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.

Workflow

Four-step deterministic flow (matches the ops org's actual workflow, not an abstract process):

1. Ingest KB. Run kb_ingester.py --input <vault-dir> on the existing wiki export. Output is a markdown health report: orphan pages, stale pages, glossary drift, missing-owner pages, cross-link map, prioritized cleanup list. The report ranks the top-20 docs to fix first — usually a mix of high-traffic stale docs and compliance-relevant missing-owner docs. Take this list to the cleanup sprint.
2. Validate existing runbooks. For each runbook in the cleanup list (or any new runbook before it goes into rotation), run runbook_validator.py --input <runbook.md>. The validator scores each step against six checks (named owner, expected duration, observable success signal, observable failure signal, rollback path, escalation contact) and produces a per-step traffic-light + overall validity score 0-100 + MUST-FIX issue list. A runbook scoring < 60 is not safe to use in an incident.
3. Generate missing SOPs. For SOPs that need to be written from scratch (or rewritten because the existing one is unsalvageable), run sop_generator.py --input <metadata.json> --profile <ops|support|finance|hr|it|regulated>. Output is a 5W2H-structured SOP scaffold: Who (RACI), What (process steps), When (triggers + frequency), Where (system + tool), Why (purpose + regulatory basis), How (step-by-step), How-much (cost + time per execution). The regulated profile adds version control, signoff, and audit-trail sections (ISO 9001 / FDA 21 CFR Part 211 / SOC 2 / HIPAA).
4. Cross-link + close the loop. Re-run kb_ingester.py after the cleanup sprint to verify orphan-page count is down and glossary drift is resolved. The metric that matters is "unfindable docs" (orphans) and "unsafe runbooks" (validity score < 60) — not page count.

Scripts

scripts/sop_generator.py — Reads a JSON metadata file describing an SOP (process owner, triggering event, audience role, frequency, regulatory overlay, inputs, outputs, steps outline) and emits a full 5W2H-structured SOP in markdown (or normalized JSON). The --profile flag tunes the output: ops (general internal ops), support (customer-support runbook style), finance (controls + reconciliation focus), hr (sensitive-data flagging), it (system + access focus), regulated (adds version control, signoff matrix, audit-trail). Regulatory overlays (SOC2, HIPAA, ISO13485, GDPR, SOX) attach the appropriate compliance preamble. --sample prints a complete vendor-offboarding SOP example. Stdlib only.

scripts/runbook_validator.py — Reads a runbook (markdown file or JSON) and validates each step against six required attributes: (1) named owner (not "the team", not "ops"), (2) expected duration (concrete number + unit), (3) observable success signal (e.g., "HTTP 200 from /healthz" — not "service is up"), (4) observable failure signal, (5) rollback path (or explicit "this step cannot be rolled back, escalate to X"), (6) escalation contact (named person or named on-call rotation). Output is a per-step traffic-light (GREEN/AMBER/RED), an overall validity score 0-100, and a MUST-FIX issue list. Verdict: ≥ 80 = SAFE-TO-USE, 60-79 = USE-WITH-CAUTION, < 60 = NOT-SAFE. --sample prints a deliberately-broken incident-comms runbook to demonstrate failure detection. Stdlib only.

scripts/kb_ingester.py — Walks a directory of markdown files (Notion export, Confluence space export, Obsidian vault, Drive/SOPs/ directory). Extracts: (a) cross-link map (which page references which, via markdown [link](path) syntax), (b) glossary candidates (frequently used proper nouns and acronyms that recur in 3+ docs without a single canonical definition page), (c) orphan pages (no inbound links from anywhere in the vault), (d) glossary drift (the same term defined or used inconsistently across docs — e.g., "CSM" expanded differently in two places), (e) stale pages (no edit in > 12 months, detected via filesystem mtime or YAML last_reviewed frontmatter), (f) missing-owner pages (no owner: field in frontmatter). Emits a KB health report markdown with a prioritized top-20 cleanup list ranked by staleness × inbound-link-count (high-traffic stale docs first). --sample builds a tiny synthetic 8-page vault in a tmpdir and runs the full pipeline against it. Stdlib only.

References

• references/5w2h_sop_canon.md — Kaoru Ishikawa's 5W2H method, Toyota standard-work discipline, Atul Gawande's checklist manifesto, Atlassian Confluence SOP guidance, ISO 9001 SOP requirements, ITIL v4 Service Operation, FDA 21 CFR Part 211. Eight cited sources covering SOP authoring canon.
• references/runbook_canon.md — Google SRE Workbook (runbook chapter), Atlassian incident-management runbooks, PagerDuty Incident Response taxonomy, AWS Well-Architected operational excellence pillar, Charity Majors on observability-runbook integration, Susan Fowler on production-ready microservices, ITIL v4 Operations. Seven cited sources covering runbook design canon.
• references/kb_hygiene_anti_patterns.md — Eight anti-patterns drawn from Notion/Confluence wiki industry research, Mozilla SUMO knowledge-base lessons, Stack Overflow community-management research, the Atlassian Team Playbook, MIT TIK org-wiki studies, Cynthia Lee on glossary drift, and Adam Wiggins on "documentation rot".

Assumptions

1. The KB is in markdown (or can be exported to markdown — Notion, Confluence, Obsidian, and Google Docs all support this). HTML-only or PDF-only KBs require a conversion pass first; out of scope.
2. The user has authority to commission rewrites or archives. Producing a cleanup list nobody acts on is wasted work — route findings to a named owner before running the ingester.
3. Owner metadata lives in YAML frontmatter (owner: alex@company.com) or in a top-of-page "Owner:" line. Tribal-knowledge ownership (the person who last edited the page) is treated as missing.
4. "Stale" defaults to 12 months. Override with --stale-days on kb_ingester.py. Some compliance regimes (FDA, ISO 13485) require shorter review cycles; use --profile regulated and --stale-days 365.
5. The user is not asking for a personal PKM. Personal Karpathy-style second-brain work belongs in engineering/llm-wiki.

Anti-patterns

• Generating SOPs in bulk without owners. A doc with no owner has a half-life of 6 months. Refuse to generate a batch of 30 SOPs unless each one is assigned to a named human.
• Using runbook_validator.py as a checkbox. The validator catches missing structure. It does not catch wrong content. A runbook can score 100 and still tell the operator the wrong thing.
• Treating orphan pages as garbage by default. Some orphans are reference pages found only via search — not all orphans should be archived. The cleanup list is a priority queue, not a delete list.
• Confusing knowledge-ops with process-mapper. Process-mapper documents the flow of work between stages (BPMN, cycle time, bottleneck). Knowledge-ops documents the artifacts operators consume to execute the work (SOP, runbook, glossary). Both can apply to the same process.
• Letting glossary drift accumulate. Two definitions of "CSM" in three years becomes seven definitions in five. Fix glossary drift the moment it surfaces in kb_ingester.py output.
• Skipping the regulated profile under regulated workload. If the process touches PHI, SOX-relevant financial controls, or ISO 13485 device QMS, use --profile regulated. Missing version control on a regulated SOP is an audit finding.
• Hand-writing 5W2H sections from memory. The 5W2H scaffold exists because operators forget "How-much". Use the generator; edit the output.

Distinct from

• engineering/llm-wiki — Karpathy-style personal PKM second brain where one human ingests sources into their own interlinked vault. Knowledge-ops is organizational: many authors, many readers, named owners per doc, formal review cycles, compliance overlays.
• engineering-team/runbook-generator — system-ops runbook for debugging a production system (logs, alerts, k8s, on-call). Knowledge-ops runbooks are operator runbooks for business processes (incident-comms cascade, vendor offboarding, employee onboarding). The audience is fellow operators, not engineers tailing logs.
• project-management/* — Jira / Confluence delivery tracking, sprint ticket workflow, project-status reporting. Knowledge-ops is the content in those Confluence pages, not the tracking of who edits them.
• business-operations/process-mapper (sibling) — BPMN process design: where the stages are, where work waits, which stage is the bottleneck. Knowledge-ops is process documentation: the SOP and runbook artifacts that tell an operator how to execute the process the mapper described.
• business-operations/internal-comms (sibling) — broadcast announcements, all-hands messaging, change-management comms. Knowledge-ops is the durable reference artifact; internal-comms is the broadcast.
• ra-qm-team/* — formal regulatory compliance authoring (ISO 13485 QMS, MDR technical files, 21 CFR Part 820). Knowledge-ops borrows the regulatory checklist but is not a substitute for a notified-body audit.

Forcing-question library (Matt Pocock grill discipline)

Before invoking the tools, the orchestrator (or /cs:grill-bizops) walks the user through these questions one at a time, with a recommended answer + canon citation. Never bundled. Walk depth-first — do not open question 4 until 1-3 are locked.

1. "Who is the named owner of this SOP / runbook, and do they know they own it?" Recommended: a single human (not "the team"), and yes — they have agreed in writing. Canon: Gawande 2009 (The Checklist Manifesto) — checklists without an owner rot within 12 months. Ownership is the discipline.

2. "When was this doc last reviewed, and what is the review cadence?" Recommended: reviewed within the last 12 months (90 days if --profile regulated); cadence written in the frontmatter. Canon: ISO 9001:2015 §7.5.3 — controlled documents require review-cycle metadata. ITIL v4 echoes this for Service Operation runbooks.

3. "For each runbook step: what is the observable success signal — by which I mean, what specific output tells you the step worked?" Recommended: a concrete observable ("HTTP 200 from /healthz", "Slack thread closed with done reaction", "Salesforce opportunity moved to Closed-Won stage") — not "the service is up" or "it works". Canon: Beyer et al. 2018 (Site Reliability Workbook, Ch. 8) — observable signals are the entire point of a runbook. Vague success criteria are the leading cause of runbook misuse during incidents.

4. "What is the rollback path for each runbook step that can fail?" Recommended: every step that mutates state has either a rollback path or an explicit "cannot roll back — escalate to X" line. Canon: AWS Well-Architected Framework, Operational Excellence pillar — "you cannot run a process you cannot reverse without first agreeing what 'reverse' means".

5. "Where does this doc live, and what other docs link to it?" Recommended: in the canonical wiki, and at least 2 inbound links from related docs. An orphan SOP is an unfindable SOP. Canon: Atlassian Team Playbook on documentation health — orphan rate > 20% is the leading indicator of a wiki sprawl problem.

6. "What is the regulatory overlay on this process — SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 13485, GDPR, SOX, none?" Recommended: explicit answer. If "none", confirm by checking the data classes the process touches. Canon: FDA 21 CFR Part 211.100 (Written procedures; deviations) — regulated SOPs require version control, change history, and signoff. Skip this step and the doc is an audit finding.

7. "Is the happy path the only path documented, or are the 2-3 most common failure modes also documented?" Recommended: the top-2 failure modes per process are documented with their own recovery sub-procedure. Canon: Fowler 2016 (Production-Ready Microservices) — operations docs that cover only the happy path are responsible for 60%+ of incident-time waste.

After all 7 are locked, invoke kb_ingester.py → runbook_validator.py → sop_generator.py in sequence.