Your company has been using SharePoint for a while now. While it has helped your company in some ways, there are some capabilities that you wish you had to manage your knowledge base. So you’re considering other options.
That’s when you came across ScreenSteps. Now, you’re impressed with ScreenSteps’ capabilities as a one-stop resource for your employees. The easy search functions and fast authoring tools are especially attractive to you.But you know it will take a lot of work to switch out your SharePoint knowledge base and into ScreenSteps. So you’re wondering is it worth it to make the switch.
When is it time to switch over to a new knowledge management system and when is it wise to stick with it?
I recently encountered this same dilemma when I was deciding whether to purchase a new camera to film videos for ScreenSteps and other personal projects. I had a camera that was working for creating videos, but I knew they could be better with a more advanced camera (from the Canon Eos R mirrorless family, for those who are interested).
To decide, I weighed the pros and cons. I considered the cost of the camera (between $999 up to $5,000), my situation, what I would use the camera for, amongst other things.
Ultimately, in my case, it wasn’t worth it to upgrade the camera yet. While the quality was better and a new camera would slightly improve production, it wasn’t necessary for the in-home filming I was using it for.
If I had planned on filming outdoor weddings, music videos, and commercials, then perhaps I would have a just cause to upgrade. But what I have is enough for the projects I was working on.
And that might be the same thing for you. Perhaps ScreenSteps would be great to upgrade to, but for your current situation, SharePoint will be enough.
Or, it could be the opposite. Maybe your situation is changing and it very well could be time to invest in ScreenSteps to help with your documentation and training. And as the Customer Support Advocate at ScreenSteps, I want to point you in the right direction so you can make an educated decision like I did with my camera.
To help you figure out what would be best for your company, I’ve provided six scenarios that suggest your company is safe to stick with SharePoint at this time. Then I provided seven scenarios where I would recommend considering investing in ScreenSteps.
Sticking to what you know is always the easiest choice. If something is working overall, then it is best to make minor tweaks in a system than to change everything out.
These examples indicate that your business is steady and operations are working smoothly overall. Basically, there isn’t much change happening in your company.
Your company already has written procedures and they’re working pretty well for you. This could be because your processes are pretty straightforward or you don’t have many procedures.
The key is your employees can find and use the guides you have without making too many mistakes.
If you need 10 new procedures a year and that covers it all, you don't need ScreenSteps. When you get having larger amounts of procedures — into the 50s and above — you need a knowledge management system to help keep your company organized.
How frequently do your procedures change? If you don’t need to update your procedures frequently, then you most likely don’t need to invest in ScreenSteps.
Updating procedures can include adding steps in a process or switching out new information (ie: pricing changes or new versions of a product).
For the most part, things are pretty stagnant. Your policies and procedures have stayed consistent over multiple months or even years, so it is already easy for you to stay on top of the updates you need to make to your guides.
How often are you adding new members to your team? Training takes time and money, but if you aren’t hiring new employees frequently, you can spend more time individually training employees.
Maybe you add one new hire a year. It’s not a big deal if they shadow you for a few months to learn the ropes. If it is every few months that you are training a new employee, you probably don't need new software to help speed up your training.
It’s hard to know the exact number of employees that you should start considering switching to ScreenSteps to onboard employees faster, but there is a gray area between 4-10 new employees a year where it starts to get painful for your team to bring on new hires.
In that case, consider how long it takes to train those employees and how much time it takes away from current employees doing their jobs.
Along with not expanding your team, you don’t need to make the switch to a new knowledge base if you don’t have a lot of turnover.
If your turnover is non-existent, then you don’t need to regularly train new employees throughout the year. You aren’t spending a lot of time training these new employees, so you're not losing time and money to training hours.
In some industries — like healthcare, banks, etc. — some mistakes can cost thousands of dollars. Then there is the risk of being sued for non-compliance.
If you aren’t in an industry where compliance is a big risk, then you may not need a system that helps your employees avoid mistakes. These employee mistakes are not the end of the world. It isn’t a big deal to fix these mistakes.
If you don’t have a major system overhaul, then you probably don’t need ScreenSteps. This could include adding new applications — like nCino or HR software — into your company.
You aren’t introducing any new systems into your environment, so you don’t need to train your whole company on a program they don’t know.
How do you know if it’s the right choice to switch to ScreenSteps? What’s going on that would make sense for you to upgrade?
Below, I share seven different situations that may be going on in your company that ScreenSteps helps solve. These are often associated with changes in your company.
If you identify with these scenarios, it may be worth your time to continue investigating how ScreenSteps could impact your company.
Do you already have any form of documentation? Documentation comes in the form of job aids, how-to guides, procedures, and policies. These could be PDF, Word docs, Excel Sheets, or some other form of documentation stored in your SharePoint account.
If you don’t have any documentation, then the ScreenSteps content creation tools will help you easily write and store your articles.
If you already have some form of documentation, you may still want ScreenSteps to make your guides interactive. With ScreenSteps, you can create step-by-step tutorials that clearly walk employees through procedures.
It’s the fastest way to create those types of materials. One customer was able to create 4X the documents in ¼ of the time with ScreenSteps.
Are you adding a new system or software to your company? If you are getting a large new system, ScreenSteps will simplify and speed up that process.
Some examples of new systems you could use ScreenSteps with include Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, nCino, etc.
ScreenSteps can save you a ton of time. Using ScreenSteps, one customer rolled out a new CRM software to 200+ employees at one time.
Training new employees can take a lot of time and cost a lot of money. You need to teach them your procedures, policies, and processes. This requires you to pull an employee to teach your new hire how things work. When training is done like this, it is like you are rewriting training each time.
If you are training on average 1 person per month, you need ScreenSteps. (That is 12 people a year, which can be overwhelming.)
Of course, this depends on your bandwidth. If you have someone who is dedicated to training and coaching new hires, then you might not need ScreenSteps.
🔍 Related: 5 Best L&D Tools to Train Employees at Businesses that are Scaling
Are you consolidating your content for multiple companies or departments? If you are merging companies or departments, you’ll want all of your procedures in one location. You don’t want to lose information during the transition.
ScreenSteps makes it easy to consolidate knowledge in one location and keep it up to date. That’s because ScreenSteps is a cloud-based knowledge base. All the content is stored on your company’s ScreenSteps site.
If you have a ton of procedures but they are scattered everywhere, then nobody is going to be able to find your guides. It is difficult for employees to flip between desktop, shared drives, emails, and more to try to locate the guides they need.
Your employees will not use your guides in SharePoint if they cannot find them. Nor, will they use them if it takes a lot of time to find them.
ScreenSteps makes it easy to consolidate knowledge in one location and keep it up to date. The information is stored on your company’s ScreenSteps site. Using keywords, your team is then able to search the system and pull up articles in seconds.
One of our clients said they were able to decrease the number of clicks it took to access the article they needed from five to two when they switched to ScreenSteps.
Does your company have a lot of complex procedures employees need to handle? When your procedures have 10 or more steps, it is difficult for employees to remember everything that they need to do. It is easy to forget one tiny detail.
These types of complex procedures could be flowcharts, spreadsheets with “if this, then that” logic, or other specific decision trees. These types of procedures are difficult for people to follow.
With ScreenSteps, our content creation tools make it easy to design complex procedures. They make it easy to follow a procedure by both using words and visual aids. ScreenSteps has:
There are three different article types to help content authors communicate the procedures. These are Standard Articles, Checklists, and Workflow Articles.
How often do your procedures change? Is it once a year? Once a month? Weekly?
If procedures change regularly and people aren’t able to keep up with those changes, then ScreenSteps can help.
Since ScreenSteps is a cloud-based knowledge base, you can make the edits in the article and publish them. Once they are published, they are immediately available to your team. The older versions of the guides are stored in case you ever need to revert them.
Not only can you keep the documentation up to date, but you can also use the Notifications feature to let everyone know about the changes.
It’s hard to know when it is time to continue using your software and when it’s time to say goodbye.
If you identified with the first six scenarios, then you are probably safe to stick with SharePoint. Adding ScreenSteps won’t create a significant enough change to put effort into switching out a new knowledge base.
On the other hand, if you identified yourself in even one of the last seven scenarios, ScreenSteps could help improve the documentation and training in your company. ScreenSteps simplifies the documentation process so that it is easier for your employees to find and use the guides they need.
Learn more about how ScreenSteps and SharePoint compare in the article below.