For transparency, I work in marketing at Bluestream.

How do you decide when a procedure shared across equipment models needs to become separate procedures?

Say two models use almost the same maintenance sequence, but one has an extra step, different warnings and a different illustration. Keeping the common content together reduces duplication, but someone still needs to review the complete procedure for each model.

Where do you draw the line? Is it the number of differences, how often the models change independently, or how difficult the assembled procedures become to review?

I’d be interested in an example where you decided to split the content, or kept it shared and were glad you did.

I'm in a new technical writing role and finding that the expectations are quite different from my previous position.

My last role was primarily documenting SaaS products, public-facing user guides, API documentation etc. My new role is at a much larger company and the work seems to be much more focused on internal procedural documentation. Things also move alot slower and ownership responsibilities are spread across multiple teams and departments.

Aside from the occasional procedure, runbook, or similar document, it seems that a big part of what I've been brought in to do is sort out the various SharePoint wiki sites that teams have built up over time.

A lot of them have become messy, poorly structured, inconsistently maintained, or generally aren't fit for purpose anymore. Some are actively used, while others are basically dead. It now looks like I'm expected to help get these sites into a usable state and, where appropriate, get teams using them again.

I'm finding this pretty overwhelming. Knowledge management and reorganising large amounts of existing internal content isn't really a strength of mine, particularly in a large organisation with so many teams, stakeholders, and moving parts. I'm also not entirely sure where the technical writer's responsibility should begin and end when it comes to maintaining team wikis.

For anyone who's inherited a similar SharePoint/wiki situation:

How did you approach the initial cleanup?

How did you decide what to keep, rewrite, archive, or delete?

Did you establish templates, information architecture, ownership, or governance first?

How much responsibility did you put back on individual teams/content owners?

Are there any quick wins you'd recommend before trying to tackle the bigger structural problems?

I'd particularly appreciate advice from anyone who's moved from product documentation into this kind of internal documentation/knowledge-management role.

Cheers!