What common IT issues should I cover in a self-service knowledge base?
Asked by
MellowPine47
I'm the sole IT technician for a small nonprofit with about 80 employees. Our current request process requires staff to contact their department head, who then submits the request through Microsoft Forms. Management has not approved letting employees contact IT directly or replacing the process, so I'm looking for ways to make routine problems easier to handle.
I'd like to create a set of organization-specific help articles with clear troubleshooting steps. We use a mix of Dell, HP, and Lenovo laptops, Active Directory for accounts, and Microsoft 365. Most staff work in the office. What common issues and topics would be useful to include?
Answers
The best articles usually come directly from recurring requests. Whenever you solve something that could have been handled with instructions, turn that solution into a short guide. Even if employees don’t read the articles on their own, you can link the relevant one in your response and avoid rewriting the same explanation repeatedly. Over time, some people will start recognizing the guides.
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Use the articles as building blocks for simple intake and automation. A basic form can collect the user’s name, department, device, symptoms, urgency, and screenshots, then store the information consistently. Later you can automate common fixes or route requests more effectively. A full ticketing platform or knowledge-base system may help, but it won’t matter much if management still requires every request to go through a department head.
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Make the guides extremely practical and visual: numbered steps, screenshots, arrows, and highlighted buttons. Good starter topics include password changes and account lockouts, connecting to Wi-Fi, printer setup, audio and camera problems in Teams, Outlook basics, OneDrive syncing, MFA enrollment, software installation, VPN access, and what to try before restarting or contacting IT. Keep each article focused on one problem and clearly say when the user should stop troubleshooting.
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Don’t try to document everything at once. Create a small set of guides based on frequency and time saved, then measure which ones actually reduce follow-up questions. Also document internal procedures for yourself: onboarding and offboarding, account permissions, device setup, backups, software licensing, recurring maintenance, and recovery steps. Those may be more valuable than end-user articles if the organization changes IT staff again.
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A knowledge base is useful, but it won’t solve the underlying access problem. The department-head approval rule is a management policy, not a limitation of the forms software. It may help to frame a future change as reducing administrative work: allow staff to submit requests directly while notifying or copying their manager, or require manager approval only for purchases, access changes, and other sensitive requests. Start by showing how much time the current process costs.
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MellowPine47: That’s the approach I’m leaning toward. I don’t get many formal requests because of the department-head requirement, but I still have plenty of time to build a useful reference library.