Knowledge Management Guidelines

Organizing and maintaining the knowledge in any organizations is very essential to make sure the knowledge is easy to access. There can be tons of knowledge but if it’s not accessible to people, its in-vain. It is like an informative website which is not indexed by the search engines and not available for everyone to access.

Knowledge can be in different forms such as documents like presentation files, word documents, text files, audio video files etc.  Knowledge also resides in people’s head. Basically the term the knowledge management (KM) refers to how all the available knowledge can be organized such that it is very convenient for everybody’s access making use of certain best practices and strategies. Knowledge Management involves creation, validation, storage and share the knowledge.

There can be different strategies and practices by different organizations and even there are tools to manage the knowledge.  In this article I would like to share what practices helped us achieve the standards in knowledge management and sustain the same. Knowledge management is a challenge because people give least importance to this activity and the activity will be out of your daily work. The organizations have to impose mandatory rules for all the employees to achieve this or have a dedicated team for this activity.. Unless the activity is made mandatory, there is less chance for effective knowledge management and miss the advantages of better knowledge management. Based on my real experiences, following are the guidelines in Knowledge Management Activities.

Identify the existing knowledge

If you are newly starting to manage the knowledge in your organizations, then the first step would be to identify the existing knowledge and make a list of them including what is the form of that knowledge for example, is a audio, video or a word document, presentation file, a wiki, basically all knowledge artifacts be it in any form.

Categorize the knowledge into different topics

Once the all the existing knowledge is identified, categorize them into different buckets. Knowledge can be categorized as Domain, Technical articles, Training Programs, Products Knowledge etc.  Organize the knowledge according to their categorization.

Identify the Gaps

Once the existing knowledge is listed down, you can then understand what information is missing. Create the missing information. Improve the knowledge artifacts to be very self explanatory. Consider always a new person while creating knowledge such as training materials, videos, audios of your domain.

Decide a location for placing the knowledge information

There can be different places where you can place all your knowledge, for example the location could your SVN repository, or in separate dedicated server, etc. The idea is that the knowledge artifacts must be accessible fast to have good user experience. Selecting repositories can be little slow than having a dedicated server and lunching a web page that displays the categorizations and hyperlinks to reach a particular one.

Index the Knowledge Artifacts

This is very important and critical action required in any Knowledge Management Activities. Some knowledge is never accessed because there is no way to access it or there is no one to say that the knowledge exists. How I did was after completing identifying the existing knowledge artifacts, created a file called ‘Master Index File’. The master index file contained hyperlinks to each and every knowledge artifacts. The master index file was structured alphabetically under each categorization and published the index file to everyone. It is equally important to see that the index file and actual knowledge artifacts will not go out of sync. This happens when the knowledge artifacts are modified or new artifacts are added and the index file is not updated with new changes. Making it mandatory rule and have the person who changes the knowledge documents to update index file will keep index file in synchronization with the artifacts.

Create a Knowledge Transfer Template

The explicit knowledge like documents, audios, and videos can be managed very well, however what about the knowledge present in people’s head? Another important objective of the knowledge management is that knowledge should not be lost at any time. Knowledge is usually lost when a person leaves the current company. To make sure the no knowledge is lost in this process, the best practice is to create a Knowledge Transfer Template where the all the transition information is captured the template acts as reference for knowledge transfer details such as what is the kind of knowledge and the person whom the knowledge was transferred etc. In my view, even the experience the people have is also knowledge which cannot transfer or store somewhere else. This kind of knowledge is referred as Tacit Knowledge.

Take User Feedbacks on the Knowledge Management

There has to be continuous rhythm of improving the quality of the knowledge artifacts. To do this, take surveys on existing management processes. Feedbacks are the only way to continuously improvise and sustain the knowledge management activities effectively.  

Advantages of Knowledge Management

To understand the importance of the knowledge management, consider for example a new employee joins the organization and since everything is new for the new joinee, the employee requires lot of information to get started with. The knowledge management plays an important role here. Properly indexed information is quicker to access.

1. Saves everyone’s time and avoids chained contacts to seek the knowledge
2. Reduce the training time required for new joinees in the company.
3. Information can be presented hierarchically organization wide.
4.  Productivity Improvements – The people can always go back to the knowledge store and read that again as brush up. The developers want information as quickly as possible and if all the knowledge is made available to them, there will be less time taken to build a software product. 

Conclusion 

Knowledge Management is handled differently in different organizations. Certain teams create Wiki for discussing day today problems and solutions. Wiki’s are a great help to share the knowledge among different people in a team. There are also open source tools that help knowledge management. Have a look at http://www.knowledge-management-tools.net. The full potential of knowledge management can be realized after implementing and start seeing the results.