Knowledge Management: A Boon in Disguise

Knowledge Management: A boon in disguise

“The only source of knowledge is experience” — Albert Einstein

Before we deep dive into the details of knowledge management, let’s understand what “Knowledge” means.

Knowledge is something that you are aware of and is your personal, learning, way of doing or looking at things. Knowledge is an intangible asset of an individual/project/organization. It is not the same as Training; which is conducted to acquire skills, degrees, etc however knowledge is an individual experience that may differ from person to person based on parameters like the individual level of experience, understanding, level of maturity, and perspective.

Interpretation of Knowledge is “how to achieve the goal” and Training is “skill with which we can achieve the goal”

In this digital world everyone has the access to knowledge but what differentiates is how fast you apply the knowledge to achieve what you want as results matter.

Irrespective of the type of organization, field, and purpose or objective of the work, knowledge, the concept of learning and unlearning is imperative. This blog focuses on knowledge management of an IT industry based on my understanding and experience of knowledge management.

In the IT sector we have heard the term Knowledge Transition aka “KT” many times, usually given when an employee leaves the project or organization, ramp up situations in a project, or to a back-up or shadow resource.

In this process, two entities are involved one who is sharing the knowledge and the other who is gaining from it. Knowledge pertaining to projects, learnings (do’s and don’ts), processes, and methodologies involved is imparted.

The important questions we need to understand are why is it important, how it is done and measured?

In an organizational structure, knowledge can be cascaded at different levels.

The approach followed can be either top-to-bottom or bottom-to-top. If knowledge is organized appropriately, it will benefit the individual group or at the org level making it easier at the project level to execute things. Resources transitioned well in a project aids in setting-up the framework in the organization and can be understood vice-versa(top to bottom)

Let’s talk about knowledge sharing at these level a bit in detail:-

Individual Group

1. Learnings from the repositories can be utilized for resource grooming
2. Knowledge sessions across the functional group can be conducted to upgrade resources about the latest trends in technology
3. Educating the individuals about standard methodologies and cross — groups knowledge sharing for effective grooming of team members

Project Level

1. Business process — Educating the team members to understand about the business processes and requirements in details as possible and reference from the repositories
2. Awareness:- Awareness about the customer and project is very important and upon following parameters:-

Cultural awareness

Know your customer (KYC)

Development environment and

The goal of the application i.e. business objective

3. Do’s and Don’ts in the project — Resources should be aware of what is expected and what isn’t expected based on the client’s direction or from previous learning of existing team members

4. Stakeholder information — Sharing internal and external stakeholder information with the new team member is important to ensure appropriate communication or address can be made

5. Team Information — Every team member is different and important it’s important for a new member to be aware of each member and their working style, so they can adapt it, learn from them, and can be able to create a better working environment

6. Project Learnings:- Project learning not only contributes to the project and its team members but also at the organizational level. Project learning can be adopted for executing similar projects with which we can avoid the mistakes that have already happened and come out in flying color with successful project delivery.

7. Role-based artifacts — Artifacts based on the roles like source code, coding standard for the developers, and test design templates to the QA should be made available for adoption.

8. KT Plans — Most importantly KT plans should be time-bound and should have a list of the topics to be covered module wise and successful confirmation from the person who is on receiving end

Organizational Level

1. Project execution process and methodology — Project execution process and methodology plays a very important role in a project’s success or failure and it completely depends upon the organization which methodology (Agile or waterfall) they are using and how detailed each process is outlined right from Project Kick off to project closure within organization repositories for a development or support project
2. Stakeholder Information — It’s very important to know your stakeholders and their whereabouts based on which you can prepare yourself for the communication based on the following parameters:

Sponsor

Responsible

Accountable

Consulted

and Informed

3. Domain Knowledge — Capturing the domain knowledge from the SMEs (Subject matter experts) or learnings documented as a part of a project lifecycle that belongs to a specific domain is really crucial. This information will help to spread the knowledge to the company’s resources via shared repositories and will be referred to as and when needed.

We are aware that knowledge is an intangible asset and differs from person to person, a project to project, and org to org.; so the important task is how to manage the knowledge and retain it within the organization. “Knowledge management” comes into the picture and not only involves capturing the lessons learned but a range of activities and setting up a framework.

Organizing Knowledge

Knowledge management involves the activities from gathering, reviewing, storing, and sharing the information. There are a variety of tools available in the market and can be chosen as per the need.

Gathering of information -

• Environment to motivate the employees to share their experiences or learnings
• Goals can be set for an individual
• Recording project learnings after a given interval to ensure knowledge is intact and can be shared
• Generating and producing domain wise process documents and of the problem encountered and their respective solution
• Any innovation implemented is documented with the problem statement

Review — the information captured can be reviewed and analyzed by SME (Subject Matter Expert ) and can be made available for reuse

Storing the information -

• Project Repositories — lessons learned from the project
• Skills Repositories: Knowledge silos wherein capturing the details as per the image and having a plan to move a resource from novice to proficient and to expert. It can be a project, domain, unit-level depending upon the number of resources. This way we know the POC and it aids in simplifying the process of imparting knowledge

• Document Repositories: Application and domain Knowledge documents etc.

Traditional ways of transitioning knowledge include:

1. One-on-One discussion
2. Demonstration — Walkthrough of the application, processes, policies, etc
3. Shadow Resource — kind of on the job training — wherein the shadow resource assists the other without being held responsible and accountable
4. Sharing the documentation repositories

Online Tools

These days all the sessions are hosted via zoom, google meet, Webex and information via SVN, google drive or VPN-based access to companies repositories.

Conclusion

Knowledge management is the heart of any organization which comes with a range of benefits.

Proper implementation of Knowledge Management ensures:

1. For new resources to become more productive and efficient in a shorter span of time
2. Better support to customer and client satisfaction can be achieved
3. Quality of deliverables improves thereby reducing the cost to the organization
4. Based on past experiences and learnings improvised decisions can be made
5. Knowledge Transition leads to innovation

No process is complete until and unless it is monitored and feedback is incorporated. At a project and individual level, there are ways to examine a resource to ensure he/she is good to take his/her journey like reverse KT, on the job assignment, the overlap of resources for fewer days (Fade in / Fade out concept), and random monitoring of the work of new resources.

This process will speak about the reliability of the information transmitted, improvement if required, and will make both the entities responsible and accountable which is a must for Knowledge management and transition.