Recently Compliance Council went through the process of moving our management system documentation from a cloud-based storage system which stored word and excel files into a more straightforward and more accessible wiki-based management system using Confluence.
You'll need to go to the Confluence Website and click on the "Try it for free" button as shown below:
When signing up, there is no credit card required for the 7-day trial, but you will need to provide your name, email address and the name of the site you are creating with them. In our case, we called the site compliance-council.
For the $10 a month plan you can invite up to 10 users, once you reach 11 users onwards each user will be $5 a month so decide if it is necessary to invite more than 10.
A space is essentially a category which you can then organise information under it using sub-categories. For larger organisations each department or team may have its own spaces with relevant processes, for example, you could have the following structure:
For smaller organisations it would make more sense to have fewer spaces, at Compliance Council we have set up two spaces:
Note: This structure may change over time as the organisation grows, and there is a need to separate the content. Thankfully Confluence has features to easily allow you to copy pages between spaces so it would be a more straightforward exercise to implement additional spaces.
Once you have established your spaces you will need to undertake some basic configuration within the "Space Settings" screen shown below:
When we set up our spaces, we adjusted the following items:
You will need to think about how you are going to organise your content within a space and establish this structure early on so other employees can add content within this structure rather than creating a version that suits them best. At Compliance Council, our page structure is shown below:
It is best to set these guidelines before you progress any further with Confluence as it will make it clear in your mind how the pages will be structured as you create the initial ones and then provide guidance for other employees who create or modify pages in future. When creating the guidelines, consider the following topics:
Based on the above guidelines, you may want to create a Page Template where you can incorporate the above items to ensure consistency across your Confluence Spaces.
We're believe that implementing management systems should be no different to any other initiative your organisation undertakes; there should be a plan for how the initiative will be implemented and sustained which can be driven through how the initiative is branded. We held a competition to come up with a name for management system where C-net was picked, we found branding it this way made it easier to refer to rather than saying "Compliance Council's Business Management System" it is much simpler to say "C-net".
Each of our spaces has a logo to assist with the branding:
If you already have a management system then the initial process of populating Confluence will be straightforward as there is an import word document feature which can be accessed through the menu on a page in the top right-hand corner as shown below:
As you create pages, it is worthwhile considering which macros that come built-in to Confluence that you could use to make the content display better or make it more interactive. Please read this page published by Atlassian that outlines the steps for using macros, and it also has a list of all of the macros available.
If you don't already have documented information that forms your management system, then you should consider purchasing a template from ISO Templates, which is one of our other companies. Compliance Council can also assist with developing a bespoke management system in Confluence that addresses the specific context of your organisation.
To extend the functionality of our Confluence instance, we conducted a review of the available plugins in the Atlassian Marketplace and selected the following plugins:
At Compliance Council, we have a monthly, whole day team meeting to discuss changes to the business and progress with projects. We utilised this meeting as a way of introducing C-net and Knowledge Hub to the team to promote the benefits of the management system being deployed through Confluence and how it will be integrated into the business and support our organisation's growth.
Since introducing Confluence to our team, we have had new content suggestions based on current projects, and we have also been able to fine-tune some of our existing processes based on feedback from the team.
Reach out to our team with your questions using the contact form on the sidebar or the contact page on our website.