How to start outlining your structure in Whale? : Whale Knowledge Base

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User roles	✗ Reader	ⱱ Writer	ⱱ Admin

Why?

Starting is the hardest part, but we will guide you to a winning documentation strategy with a step-by-step approach.

You have to look at this from a tree perspective. You start at the top with a Board, that board contains Libraries, that have multiple Playbooks underneath it and the last level are your cards.

Outlining a general company board that applies to everyone is a great start! Think of this as core processes. I.e. a company department. The further you drill down on the levels, the more in detail you go, finishing at Card level with the different steps of a process.

Let's have this visualised with an example!

Our boards are shown in a first overview.
- Here as departments
Underneath we find our libraries
- That's where you break up big chunks of content or your different processes within a department
Playbooks!
- What is important to know from
List of cards
- Each playbook contains an amount of cards that can be seen as the different steps of a specific process within a team.

As a best practice, we suggest you start to create Boards with the assignees already in mind. I.e., thinking of the person or function means the board outline will flow more easily.

Here are some more tips for outlining the board structure and content:

First, make Boards and Playbooks that apply to everyone in the organization (i.e., Remote work policy, PTO procedures, etc.)
Next, build Boards for department-specific information (i.e., Monthly reports, building a website)
Then, build Boards and Libraries with role-specific information (i.e., Payroll, audits, employee reviews)

Tips for outlining the playbooks and it's card content:

A playbook contains the detailed processes of your role-specific information (i.e., different type of audits, reviews for different roles,...)
As you drill down it's the cards that hold all information. Don't make them too long as you want those to be easy to consume and to be found quickly. (i.e., Objective of this audit, How to start an audit, How to log an audit, How to report an audit,...)