The Saturday KB hygiene drill
Thirty-five minutes of knowledge-base maintenance that keeps Monday's drafts from citing stale content. A year in, here's the drill that actually stuck.
A KB that rots takes the drafts on top down with it. We’ve written that line more than once; this post is the weekly drill that keeps it from becoming true for us.
Thirty-five minutes, every Saturday morning. Timer runs. When it rings, you stop.
Minutes 0–10: freshness alerts
Open the freshness dashboard. Every block flagged red is older than its category’s expiry clock — 90 days for security posture, 180 for product capability, 365 for company background. Resolve the top 10 reds. Resolve means one of three things: re-attest (no change), edit (change captured, version bumped), or retire (no longer applicable, archived with reason).
Do not triage. Do not queue. Ten reds, closed, one of the three actions each.
Minutes 10–20: recent citations, highest-frequency
Open the “most-cited this week” list. Top 10 blocks. Spot-check each against its source of truth — the current marketing page, the current contract template, the current security page. Any block that no longer matches source of truth gets a red flag and jumps the queue for next week. Two minutes each.
This is the one most teams skip. Stale high-frequency blocks are the single biggest source of shipped errors in grounded drafts.
Minutes 20–30: orphan check
Orphans are blocks with no owner. The dashboard lists them. Each one gets an owner assigned or an archive action. Ownership without a named human is not ownership. SparrowGenie’s audit of content-library failures named this specifically — unclear ownership is the root cause of the PDF-written-for-a-different-vertical problem.
Minutes 30–35: the one deletion
One block, every week, gets deleted. Not archived. Deleted. The criterion: a block that hasn’t been cited in 180 days and that no one can articulate a use case for.
Most KB disciplines grow monotonically. Retirement needs a forcing function.
Done. Coffee. The drill does not need to be done on a Saturday. It does need to be done somewhere outside the Monday-through-Friday deadline rhythm — otherwise it loses to the next incoming RFP every week.