You’ve decided to invest in a ScreenSteps knowledge base for your company.
The thing is that implementing ScreenSteps requires you to create knowledge base articles for all of your policies and procedures, which can be a lot of work.
You may feel overwhelmed with everything you need to import and/or write. Looking at your to-do list, you might feel like you’ll never be able to get everything done and launch on time.
How do you even tackle filling your knowledge base with content?
Since Trevor DeVore and I co-founded ScreenSteps in 2003, I’ve met with a lot of new customers intimidated by the content creation mountain. While worried at first, they were able to create guides and launch swiftly.
The key was they used the 80% Launch approach. It is the fastest and most efficient way to launch ScreenSteps in a business.
In this post, I’ll explain what an 80% Launch is. Then I’ll walk you through the five-step process to executing an 80% Launch plan.
What is an 80% Launch?
The 80% Launch approach helps you to get your knowledge base out of draft mode and into the hands of the end-users faster.
An 80% Launch means you have guides for the procedures that take up 80% of your employees’ time. These are your most frequently needed policies and procedures.
How did we land on 80%?
It strikes the right balance between launching your knowledge base quickly and making sure you have enough content to make an impact on employee performance when you launch.
Creating content for the tasks that take up 80% of your employees' time is much more achievable than covering 100% of all the scenarios they might encounter.
If your employees can find what they need in your knowledge base 80% of the time, their performance will improve and they will start to trust your knowledge base.
The content which covers the additional 20% of where employees spend their time (which you will create after launching your ScreenSteps knowledge base) deals with procedures that your employees don’t frequently use. They have a lesser impact on your operations.
While you need to create those 20% guides, you don’t have regular questions about them. So launching without those 20% guides won’t be detrimental to your employees learning to find, follow, and trust your knowledge base.
Our customers that do an 80% Launch achieve performance improvements and positive ROI faster than any other customers.
🔎 Related: 3 Approaches to Create Content For Your ScreenSteps Launch
How to do an 80% Launch
An 80% Launch is a five-step process. Here is how it works.
- Identify the tasks that cause 80% of the problems
- Determine when you will launch
- Import relevant content
- Prepare the 80% content
- Launch ScreenSteps
1. Identify the tasks that cause 80% of the problems
First, you’ll need to hold a Find & Follow Planning Workshop. A Find & Follow Planning Workshop helps you identify:
- What your employees need to be able to do
- Which guides employees need to successfully complete tasks
- Which training courses and activities you need to prepare
Using your Find & Follow report from the workshop, identify which tasks cause 80% of the problems.
You can look at this in two ways:
- Which tasks are they required to perform 80% of the time?
- Which tasks, when they come up, cause the biggest problems (questions, mistakes, etc.)?
It really depends on your work environment. If your team is able to perform their normal day-to-day tasks without too much help, then target the most complicated scenarios first.
If your team struggles in their day-to-day tasks, then target the most frequently performed tasks first.
Either way, you want to tackle the tasks that are causing 80% of the problems (questions, mistakes, etc.). This could be 10 tasks, 20 tasks, or 100 tasks. Whatever the number, if you create digital guides for those tasks, things will improve significantly.
This list will be much more manageable than trying to complete everything and it will have a tremendous impact on productivity.
2. Determine when you will launch
Choose a launch date. You’ll want to be realistic about this target date. This will depend on how many articles you need to upload/create as well as how many employees you have authoring articles.
Then set deadlines leading up to the launch date for uploading and/or creating content.
3. Import relevant content
If you have existing content to import, import only the content that employees actually use. Don't import everything just because you have it.
Identify which existing resources your employees actually use and get rid of the rest.
4. Prepare the 80% content
Take the content you identified in the first step and either update it or create it as necessary. Get your guides to a point where an employee can successfully perform the task without assistance or mistakes.
Whether you are supplementing existing content or building a library from scratch, fill in any gaps until you reach the 80% threshold.
5. Launch ScreenSteps
Once you have those guides prepared, launch ScreenSteps to your team. You will see an immediate performance improvement. That performance improvement will free up time for your team to go back and create or update the additional guides.
We have seen situations where an organization may have dozens of procedures, but where there were only 3-5 procedures that were causing the biggest problems. They were able to launch very quickly and see an immediate impact.
For example, one group used this 80% approach and reduced the time it took for a new hire to become proficient in a very complicated task from 24 weeks down to 4 weeks. That one procedure had a major impact on the organization.
Achieve ROI faster with the 80% Launch
Preparing content and filling your knowledge base can be an intimidating task. Now, you have a five-step plan to make the task more doable. The 80% Launch method helps you create enough content to support your end-users as you continue to fill your knowledge base post-launch.
The best part is you start seeing performance improvements and achieving a positive ROI within a few weeks.
The first step to the 80% Launch is holding a Find & Follow Planning Workshop. You can conduct the workshop on your own or you can hire ScreenSteps to lead a workshop for your team.
Our ScreenSteps experts can be a powerful outside voice that directs your team so you focus on helping your authors create the right guides to support your end-users.
Schedule a Find & Follow Planning Workshop with a ScreenSteps expert. Or talk to a ScreenSteps rep about how we can help you better prepare for launch and do it faster.
