Knowledge and Records Management Essentials Training Course

Course overview

Knowledge and records management failures rarely begin with a missing policy. They begin when staff save final documents in personal drives, retain customer correspondence without a disposal rule, duplicate reports across collaboration sites, or cannot prove which version informed a decision. These practices increase legal exposure, slow audits and investigations, weaken institutional memory, and make it difficult for leaders to rely on the information held by the organisation. This course gives participants a practical foundation for bringing order, accountability and usable knowledge to business information.

Participants learn how to distinguish records, working documents, knowledge assets and transitory information; map information flows; develop a business classification scheme; define metadata; set retention and disposal rules; and establish ownership and access controls. The course applies ISO 15489 principles alongside practical configuration considerations for SharePoint and Microsoft Purview. Participants also learn to assess current controls, identify high-risk recordkeeping gaps, design governance roles, and measure adoption through usable compliance indicators rather than policy publication alone.

Instructor-led briefings are combined with realistic case material involving contracts, project records, employee files, customer communications and operational procedures. Teams analyse an information landscape, build a file plan and retention schedule, draft a records-management workflow, and test retrieval requirements against a simulated audit request. Each participant leaves with a tailored Knowledge and Records Management Improvement Plan, including a current-state assessment, priority risks, governance actions, a classification structure and a 90-day implementation roadmap that can be presented to management.

The course is suited to professionals who administer information, lead operational teams, support compliance, manage digital workplaces or are being asked to formalise recordkeeping practices. It is particularly valuable where organisations are moving from shared drives and informal collaboration tools toward defensible, searchable and consistently governed information environments.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Classify business information as records, knowledge assets, working documents or transitory material using defined decision criteria
• Map an end-to-end information lifecycle from creation and capture through retention, disposition and defensible destruction
• Build a functional file plan and business classification scheme for a selected organisational area
• Define mandatory metadata fields, naming conventions and version-control rules that improve retrieval and accountability
• Draft retention and disposal rules using legal, operational, financial and historical value criteria
• Assess records-management risks using a control-gap register and prioritised remediation actions
• Design records governance roles, escalation routes and ownership responsibilities using a RACI matrix
• Produce a 90-day Knowledge and Records Management Improvement Plan for workplace implementation

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• Records Managers and Records Officers — who need to establish consistent classification, retention and disposal controls
• Information Governance Managers — who must connect policy requirements with day-to-day information practices
• Compliance and Risk Professionals — who need defensible evidence, retention controls and audit-ready information
• Knowledge Managers — who must make operational knowledge findable without confusing it with formal records
• Digital Workplace and SharePoint Administrators — who configure collaboration environments that must support recordkeeping requirements
• Operations Managers — who own business processes and need reliable access to current, trustworthy organisational information

Requirements and prerequisites

Participants should have working experience with business documents, shared drives, Microsoft 365 collaboration spaces, line-of-business systems or departmental procedures. Familiarity with basic concepts such as access permissions, document versions, folders, confidentiality and organisational policies will help participants contribute fully to the exercises. No previous records-management qualification, legal training, system-administration access or prior use of Microsoft Purview is required. This is a fundamentals course for professionals who already handle organisational information and now need a structured, defensible approach; complete beginners should expect to work with practical terminology and sample business scenarios from the first day.

Training methodology

The programme uses instructor-led concept sessions to establish ISO 15489-aligned principles, followed by hands-on design work using a running organisational case. Participants inspect sample records, collaboration sites and policy extracts; make classification and retention decisions; and compare approaches in facilitated groups. Practical workshops use templates for information-flow mapping, metadata design, risk registers and RACI matrices. Daily debriefs connect each exercise to workplace constraints, while the final day converts the completed artefacts into a prioritised implementation plan for participants’ own functions.

Course outline

Day 1: Information, knowledge and records foundations

• Business value and risk of managed organisational information
• Distinguishing records, documents, knowledge assets and transitory information
• ISO 15489 records-management principles and terminology
• Records lifecycle stages from creation to disposition
• Authoritative source identification and version-control requirements
• Information governance roles, accountability and policy hierarchy
• Current-state information landscape mapping

Workshop: Participants map a selected business process and produce an information landscape showing systems, owners, record types and control gaps.

Day 2: Classification, metadata and retrieval design

• Functional classification versus organisational and subject-based filing
• File-plan architecture and hierarchical classification rules
• Metadata schemas for retrieval, ownership, sensitivity and retention
• Controlled vocabularies, naming conventions and taxonomy governance
• Folder structures, content types and document sets in SharePoint
• Search, filtering and retrieval testing from a user perspective
• Migration preparation and legacy-content clean-up decisions

Workshop: Participants build a draft file plan and metadata profile for a business unit, then test it against realistic retrieval requests.

Day 3: Retention, disposition and defensible control

• Retention-schedule structure and record-series definition
• Legal, regulatory, contractual and operational retention triggers
• Appraisal criteria for business, evidential and historical value
• Disposition actions: destroy, transfer, archive and review
• Legal holds, investigations and suspension of normal disposal
• Audit trails, disposal authorisation and destruction evidence
• Retention labels and event-based retention in Microsoft Purview

Workshop: Participants create retention rules for a case organisation and document approval, hold and destruction controls in a disposition workflow.

Day 4: Governance, risk and technology-enabled practice

• Records-management risk assessment and control-gap analysis
• RACI design for business owners, IT, legal, compliance and records teams
• Access classification, permissions and confidentiality controls
• Microsoft Purview retention labels, label publishing and disposition review
• SharePoint information architecture and records declaration options
• Policy, procedure, training and adoption-control design
• Compliance metrics, quality checks and management reporting

Workshop: Participants complete a records-control gap register and produce a RACI matrix for introducing improved governance in the case organisation.

Day 5: Knowledge continuity and implementation planning

• Capturing tacit knowledge through lessons learned and structured handovers
• Knowledge-article ownership, review cycles and authoritative publishing
• Separating knowledge bases from evidential records repositories
• Change-impact analysis for new classification and retention practices
• Stakeholder engagement and communication planning
• Phased implementation roadmap, quick wins and dependency management
• Implementation measures for adoption, retrieval quality and disposal compliance

Workshop: Participants consolidate their course artefacts into a 90-day Knowledge and Records Management Improvement Plan and present its priorities to a mock leadership panel.

Tools & standards covered

Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Purview, ISO 15489, MoReq2010

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions