Passing the Torch: Ensuring Smooth Knowledge Transfer
In every company people come and invest time, money or more.
And then, one day: they leave.
Whatever the reasons, the departure of colleagues always presents a significant issue for both the team and the company they were part of: how do we make sure we don’t lose knowledge and competencies of departing colleagues throughout the life of a project?
Working at Doctolib for 3 years within the same scope, I sought to explore new opportunities by moving to another team. I’ve been asked and I aimed to ensure that my future ex-colleagues wouldn’t need me anymore, neither my knowledge and competencies.
Why share knowledge?
It’s not only about assisting your team in coping with your departure; it’s also about ensuring that you’re not irreplaceable — nobody is, right? — and making sure your colleagues are learning from your competencies and knowledge.
It’s what we call the Bus Factor or — more optimistic — Lottery Factor. If you’ve never heard of it, you should have a look at this article from Roy Herrod. In short, the Lottery Factor is the number of persons who have to leave your team/company, for the project to fail.
If proactive knowledge sharing is not the only key to increase the Lottery Factor, it is certainly one thing that can help a lot.
What knowledge should you share with your colleagues?
Identifying the subjects to share is the initial challenge. We don’t want to waste time on sharing knowledge that other people already possess. Let’s establish a strategy to save both your colleagues’ time and your own.
When I had to identify the knowledge to share, I came up with these steps:
- Compile all the subjects you’ve got knowledge on.
- Create a table with fine-grained subjects — not overly specific, but not too broad either.
For example, with one row for each subject and one column for each colleague you should share knowledge with. - Ask your colleagues to rate their knowledge on these subjects — from “What is that?” to “I’m able to help others on this subject”.
- Take the table results with a grain of salt as people may overestimate or underestimate their expertise. Rely on your day-to-day experiences with your colleagues (pair programming, code reviews, etc.).
- Prioritize the subjects you should talk about! 🎉
You could end with a table like this one (with many more rows):
How to actually share your knowledge?
Knowing what knowledge to share is just as crucial as the format you choose. While comprehensive written documentation is a common approach, creating clear and well-organized documents can be time-consuming.
Fortunately, there are other good ways of sharing your knowledge. For instance if you are a developer, you can take advantage of code reviews. They are a good occasion to highlight tricky aspects on your scope or common mistakes.
As it brings discussions and interactions, your colleagues will probably remember them. Much more likely than if they had to read the specific concern in a 150 pages documentation.
The same goes about pair programming and reviewing sessions (think of benevolence when performing reviews 😉) which often tend to start extensive discussions or debates about subjects and serve as excellent opportunities to share and acquire knowledge about your project.
Acquiring and sharing your knowledge should be part of your daily job. First, to reduce your cognitive load by sharing it with your colleagues. Second, to make sure the project won’t come to an end if you’re about to leave — Lottery factor, you named it.
You can do it in a lot of other ways: training sessions, code walkthroughs, schemas (sequence, architecture,…), by sharing relevant links and frequently used documentation.
Choose the format that makes understanding easy, ensures retention, minimizes the time spent searching for information, and allows for easy updates.
When to stop sharing knowledge?
A simple answer would be: never! However, in cases like retirement or departure from a company, you should have a clear target on how much your colleagues own the knowledge.
You got it! This assessment of your colleagues’ knowledge gained through sharing sessions marks the start of a new knowledge-sharing cycle (as mentioned in the first step of this article) 🙌
If there is still knowledge to share, initiate a new knowledge sharing cycle, and repeat until both you and your colleagues are confident in the project’s stability without your involvement.
Conclusion
Sharing knowledge can be time-consuming. Nevertheless, this investment is worthwhile given the time, cognitive load reduction, and stress relief it brings to both you and your colleagues.
So... Let’s actively share knowledge! 👐
