Knowledge management: WTF?! — Issue #5
In the course of history, corporate management discipline has suffered a clear division between those subjects who consider the company as something physical, consisting of a seat, capital, and contracts, and those who see the company as a organization, formed by an huddle of relationships and interactions between the participants.
One of the most prominent members of the anti-patriotic concept was the remarkable attention of Chester Barnard, an American writer and business executive who lived until the mid-twentieth century.
As already written, following Taylor’s theory, the worker was subjected to a very serious alienation as much as to be deemed a gear of the business system.
Due to such philosophy of thought, Barnard developed a theory that takes the name of Cooperative Conception of the Organization, whose main precept is that the company is considered an organization where individuals cooperate and collaborate.
Such thinking fits perfectly with management choices within a startup because it is of fundamental importance to share ideas, thoughts, doubts or perplexities with all the people who work within the project in order to work better and pursue the business goal better.
Usually however, within a startup especially at an early stage, the team is made up of few people without no well-defined roles; everyone must know how to do more as much as being part of the company’s life.
It’s obvious that only through collaborative climate you can find the best business channels that lead to individuals taking full advantage of their own wit and creativity, thanks to free initiative and desire to do so.
Traditional working sight puts workers divided into departments, focused on excellence in their field, but this is not well-connected with the startup ecosystem where there is more advantage in creating cross-functional collaborations.
A confirmation of this statement is also reflected in Lean Production’s guiding principles, in particular in small batch production or production cells.
In fact, working side by side, one aspect at a time, task after task, the continuous development phase undergoes a remarkable improvement and constantly pushes on production changes based on the learning achieved.
Briefly, the entrepreneur must create an optimal place of cooperation and collaboration and must learn how to manage the dissemination of information and ideas among the various workers best.
As we have said, in startups, such as small businesses, is somewhat more simple thanks to a much lower amount of resources to manage.
This phenomenon is defined as knowledge management, a set of strategies, practices, experiences and business processes.
The objective must therefore be to gather together the knowledge gained over time by each member and the organization itself and and spread it to everyone as efficiently as it can be achieved.
Workers within a startup context must not keep their documents, data, and business information within their personal repositories — phones, personal emails, computers — but a common space for all business knowledge that the entrepreneur is very adviced to structure up.
Fortunately, today’s newest technology, with the cloud technology being the most renowned, helps to do this in a much simpler way.
Finally it is important to cite a practice of proper information management within each task, the Kanban knowledge management method.
Despite this method being first used in the Toyota Production System from which the name stems from, what we are interested in considering is the reformulation implemented by David Anderson in his book published in 2010, Kanban.
Anderson leads a consultancy company, with the specific goal of improving business performance through proper decision-making management.
In 2004, during an advisory meeting for Microsoft, he put into practice an alternative use of the Kanban methodology, and more specifically the Kanban Board, as a method for displaying the work in progress.
The Kanban Board, therefore, is nothing more than a blackboard, which in the simplest case can be divided into three sections: to do, doing, done — on which the predefined activities move from left to right.
Using this methodology allows you to view the work in progress divided into tasks, estimate the time needed for each task, and maintain a regular workflow, and finally learn from your own estimation errors in order to reduce the development time.
Photos by Lysander Yuen, Corinne Kutz, Ryan Franco.
