Built a central documentation hub for a digital product team whose process and technical knowledge was scattered across drives, email threads, and agency systems.
→ Documentation scattered across individual drives, email threads, and agency systems consolidated into a single SharePoint. That foundation enabled a full website copy and IA rewrite in collaboration with the wider business.
Problem
The digital product team had no central documentation repository, which created risk and slowed onboarding for anyone joining the team or the agency.
Context
This sat within the wider Fortescue delivery rebuild, where scattered knowledge was one of several symptoms of a delivery model that had lacked an owner for long enough.
Business objective
Establish a structured documentation framework that could act as the reliable reference point for the product team, internal stakeholders, and the agency.
Customer/user objective
New starters and existing team members alike needed a single place to check a process or confirm a decision, rather than relying on whoever happened to remember it.
Constraints
The team was mid-delivery throughout, so building the new structure couldn't come at the cost of pausing live work. Migrating everything at once also wasn't realistic given the volume scattered across drives, threads, and agency systems.
Stakeholders
The digital product team, the lead technology agency, and new starters on either side who needed a faster route into the platform's process and technical context.
Research and discovery
I audited existing documentation across the team and the agency first, to understand what actually existed and where it lived before designing anything new.
Options considered
I considered a lighter-touch shared drive reorganisation versus a proper SharePoint structure with defined ownership and a review cadence. I chose the latter, since a reorganised drive would have scattered again within months without ownership behind it.
Prioritisation
I migrated the key process and technical documents that mattered first, rather than trying to move everything at once, so the structure proved its value early.
Delivery
I designed a new SharePoint structure with a clear taxonomy, defined ownership for each section, and a review cadence to keep it current, then created templates for the processes that came up repeatedly and introduced a governance model to stop the structure degrading back into the scattered state it started in.
Decisions made
The decision to assign ownership per section, rather than leaving the whole structure as a shared responsibility nobody was accountable for, was what stopped it drifting back into disorder.
Trade-offs
Migrating only the documents that mattered, rather than everything, meant some older material stayed unmigrated. I accepted that since chasing full completeness would have delayed the structure being usable at all.
Business outcome
The centralised documentation hub became standard practice for the team and the agency, and this foundation also enabled a full rewrite of the website’s copy and information architecture, carried out in collaboration with the wider business.
Customer outcome
New team members and agency resources had one place to point to instead of chasing knowledge held only in individuals' heads.
Lessons learned
A documentation structure only survives if ownership and a review cadence are built in from the start. A reorganisation without either just delays the next scatter.
What I'd improve today
I'd introduce the review cadence and ownership model on day one of the migration rather than adding it once the structure was already partly built.
