Developing a high-quality organizational plan for your internal knowledge base is just like building the foundation of a building. Taking the time to spec out the structure of your knowledge base will make it easier to know where to put things, which makes it easier for your teammates to navigate and find what they need without asking.
Here are some tips from customers on how they structure their information.
Tettra is built on the following hierarchy: Categories > Subcategories > Pages.
While the way you want to organize your information within this hierarchy is up to you, we’ve found the best ways to structure your account are either departmental, project based, topic based, or a mix of all three.
A departmental structure means that you break down your categories by department within your org. For example, you could have categories for Marketing, Sales, Support, Engineering, and HR/Operations.
Once you’ve setup categories by department, you can break down subcategories within each category by a sub topic or team.
Here’s an example structure for a Sales team:
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Structuring categories by project (or client) can be beneficial if you’re teams tend to work cross-functionally or don’t need access to everything else in the knowledge base often.
Some companies tend to do this for projects like weekly/monthly recurring meetings, competitive research, fundraising, testing, onboarding materials, or business development. You can also structure by client, with a category for each client and subcategories for each topic:
Here’s an example structure for a client-based approach:
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Finally, you can always organize by topic.
This tends to be most useful if you’re using Tettra with just a single team or you’re planning on only putting one type of information (e.g. an employee handbook) inside of Tettra.
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Don’t feel like you need to stick to one strict approach. Many teams use a mix of all three organizational structures.
In fact, we use all three approaches at Tettra (the company) for our own Tettra (the product). For example, we use categories for departments (Sales, Engineering, Support) and for Topics (Company Updates, Office & Ops, Weekly Planning).
Sometimes if a subcategory becomes really important, we’ll elevate it to the category level to make it easier to access. That’s exactly what happened to our Weekly Planning category, which started off as a subcategory inside of Company Updates.
There’s really one right way to organize your hierarchy for your Tettra account. Just do whatever feels right to start, and make tweaks as you go.
