Confluence at NAV

NAV IKT (The Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration ICT) has a large system portfolio consisting of several hundred applications. The responsibility for developing and managing the system portfolio changes regularly. This places strict demands on complete documentation and easy navigation for users and various user groups.

Employees and vendors at NAV spent much time searching through the documentation, which was unclear and not very consistent. Production of new documentation was especially resource-demanding due to lack of a common standard for everyone to follow. Consequently, the new documentation was often incomplete and of variable quality.

Our assignment was to implement a methodology for Confluence that makes demands on contents, structure, and searchability, focusing on active information sharing. The objective was to ensure that Confluence always contains updated and easily accessible information.

Result

We introduced a system for uniform management of templates, ensuring that the users, as a starting point, always use the latest approved version of a template. What was previously available in large Word templates is now divided into smaller templates that can be used separately.  This is a huge gain in that it involves increased searchability, more easily manageable changes to templates and faster documentation updates. A self-developed extension to Confluence ensures that the users make use of correct structure and naming, with contents in accordance with published templates.

Our system is adopted for system documentation for over 125 applications. All system documentation is currently based on 30 templates, a template representing a chapter. Technical and functional architects can continually approve the documentation on chapter level, and easily get an overview of status of all elements in a system.

The three main results were

Simple access to relevant documentation

Confluence is now a portal for all system solutions documentation

The documents are built up following a predefined page structure

The solution gives accurate hits in search

Support for documentation approval

Approval report for all produced documentation

Automatic production of deliverable notes

Overview of remaining tasks

Documentation managed efficiently 

Templates are managed in one location

Documentation created through centrally configured menu options

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