On the first day of spring (or the fifth month of winter, whatever) the submission of applications for - conference about knowledge management in IT companies. Frankly, the results of Call for Papers exceeded all expectations. Yes, we understood that the topic was relevant, we saw it at other conferences and meetups, but we could not even think that it would open up so many new facets and angles.
Total Program Committee received 83 applications for reports. As expected, more than two dozen arrived in the last XNUMX hours. We in the Program Committee have all tried to understand why this is happening. And then one of us admitted that he himself often put it off until the last minute, because it never occurred to him that at the time of the application deadline, work on many reports: phone calls, discussions, receiving feedback, has been going on for a month or two, more In addition, most of the program may already be completed.
We understand that from the point of view of those who apply, it looks something like the picture below, but it is not.
From the outside, it seems that after the deadline, everything is just beginning, that we have just gathered as the Program Committee and are starting to sort out applications, so it’s not difficult to take and process another one. But in fact, we did not sit idly by at all. But this is just a lyrical digression to share what Call for Papers looks like from inside the PC, back to the reports.
83 is almost 3,5 reports per place in the program, and now we have to select the best and bring them to a state close to ideal.
Application Trends
The received applications allow us to roughly understand the trend - what worries everyone right now. This happens at every conference, for example, at TeamLeadConf for two years in a row at the peak of the popularity of OKR, performance review and developer evaluation. At HighLoad++, there is a steady interest in Kubernetes and SRE. And we have the following trends.
We used the Gartner Hype Cycle technique to arrange the topics on the chart, where the trend visibility and maturity indicators increase along the axes. The following stages are distinguished in the cycle: "launch of technology", "peak of inflated expectations", "lower point of popularity", "slope of enlightenment" and "maturity plateau".
In addition to trends, there were also many applications that go beyond knowledge management in IT, so let's indicate for the future that our conference is not about:
- e-learning in isolation from the peculiarities of training adult professionals, employee motivation, knowledge transfer processes;
- documentation in isolation from knowledge management processes, this is just one of the tools;
- examination and description of business processes and business logic as is and other typical methods from the work of a system analyst without reference to more complex cases from knowledge management about the system and about processes.
KnowledgeConf 2019 will be held in three tracks - in total 24 reports, several meetups and workshops. Next, I’ll tell you about the applications already accepted into the program so that you can decide whether you need to go to KnowledgeConf (of course, you need to).
All reports, round tables and master classes will be divided into 9 thematic blocks:
- Onboarding and onboarding for beginners.
- Knowledge management processes and the creation of a culture of exchange.
- Internal and external training, motivation to share knowledge.
- Personal knowledge management.
- Knowledge bases.
- Technologies and knowledge management tools.
- Training of specialists in knowledge management.
- Evaluation of the effectiveness of the knowledge management process.
- Knowledge management systems.
We looked at the experience of other conferences and did not group the reports in the schedule by topics in a row, and vice versa encourage participants to move between rooms, and not grow into a chair on a track that is interesting to them. This will allow you to switch the context, avoid repeating the material, and also prevent situations when the crawler gets up and goes out to talk with the speaker, and the next one will have to speak in an empty room.
Knowledge management is about people and building processes, and not just about platforms, tools or creating a knowledge base, so we have a lot of attention in the program and topics motivation, building a culture of knowledge sharing and communication.
Our speakers are very different: from young and daring team leaders of IT companies to representatives of large corporations; from specialists from large companies that have been building knowledge management systems for a long time to representatives of the academic and university environment.
Knowledge Management Systems
The conference will start with a fundamental Alexey Sidorin from CROC. It will outline the current state of knowledge management approaches and systems, outline a kind of big picture in modern knowledge management, provide a framework for further perception and set the tone for the entire conference.
Complementary to this theme Vladimir Leshchenko from Roscosmos "How to implement a knowledge management system in business", will allow us all to look into the life of a huge corporation, where effective knowledge management is a must have. Vladimir has extensive experience in implementing knowledge management systems in a large enterprise. He worked on this for a long time at Rosatom, a knowledge corporation, and now he works at Roscosmos. At KnowledgeConf, Vladimir will tell you what to pay attention to when designing a knowledge management system for its successful implementation in a large company and what are the typical implementation errors.
By the way, Vladimir runs a YouTube channelin which he interviews knowledge management experts.
Finally, at the end of the conference, we are waiting for Alexandra Solovieva from Miran “How to triple the amount of knowledge in the minds of technical support engineers”. Alexander, in the form of an address to himself from the past, will tell you how best to approach the creation of a complex knowledge management system service in the technical support team, what artifacts to create, how to motivate employees to create knowledge integrated into the management system adopted in the company.
Onboarding
A strong block of reports about onboarding and adaptation of newcomers to technology and engineering teams is planned. Communication with the participants of TeamLead Conf 2019, where our PC had its own booth, showed that it is the scaling and setting this process on track in a constantly changing environment that hurts the audience the most.
Gleb Deikalo from Badoo, Alexandra Kulikova from Skyeng and Alexey Petrov from Funcorp will talk about three different approaches to onboarding in scale and application.
First Gleb Deikalo в "Welcome aboard: we commission developers" will talk about the onboarding framework that several development team leaders have built for their teams. How they went from a "collection of links" and personal lectures to a semi-automatic, working and set on rails procedure for incorporating newcomers into projects and work tasks.
Then Alexandra Kulikova from Skyeng will focus all the experience of the company's edtech and , how they built a whole division aka the Incubator, where they simultaneously hire juniors (gradually transferring them to product teams over time), training them with the help of mentors, and at the same time train developers for team leads, and at the same time do simple production tasks that were previously given to freelance .
Alexandra will tell not only about successes, but also about difficulties, about performance metrics and how they work with mentors and how this program helps not only juniors, but also mentors themselves.
Finally, the Alexey Petrov in the report "Adaptation checklist as a tool for soft induction" A more easily reproducible, but no less cool technique is adaptation checklists, which clearly record the beginner’s actions from the moment they join the team, a clear definition of done for each stage of onboarding, and the expected completion time.
Knowledge Management Processes and Building a Culture of Sharing
The reports from this thematic block will tell you how you can build knowledge sharing processes in a team, within which colleagues will strive to rummage through the context, fix the results and work process both for their “future selves” and for other team members.
Igor Tsupko from Flant how to reveal secret knowledge and competencies that are concentrated in the minds of employees using the widely used performance review technique. Was it possible to use the goal setting and evaluation methodology to uncover the mysteries of competencies concentrated in the minds of employees? We learn from the report.
Alexander Afenov from Lamoda in the report "It's hard to be Kolya: theory and practice of knowledge sharing at Lamoda" about newcomer Nikolai, who came to work at Lamoda and has been trying to join the team for half a year now, receiving information from various sources: onboarding plan, field trip, to real warehouses and pickup points, communication with a mentor from the "oldies", knowledge base , internal conferences and even a telegram channel. Alexander will tell you how all these sources can be organized into a system, and then even used to share company knowledge outward. Each of us has a little of Kolya.
Maria Palagina from Tinkoff Bank in the report “If you don’t want to get wet, swim: a voluntary-compulsory exchange of knowledge” how the QA team took the liberty of solving the problems of insufficient sharing and the loss of knowledge and competencies within the team and between teams. Maria will offer a choice of two approaches - democratic and dictatorial, and will tell you how they can be effectively combined depending on the goals.
Personal Knowledge Management
Another interesting block of reports is about managing personal knowledge, taking notes and organizing a personal knowledge base.
Let's start with the topic Andrey Alexandrov from Express42 "Application of the practices of Thiago Forte to manage your knowledge". Once Andrey was tired of forgetting everything, like Dory the fish in the famous cartoon - read books, reports, documents. He tried many knowledge storage techniques, and Thiago Forte's practices proved to be the best. In his report, Andrey will talk about such practices as Progressive Summarization and RandomNote and their implementation on Calibra, MarginNote and Evernote.
If you want to come prepared, then google who Thiago Forte is and read him . And after the report, be sure to immediately apply at least one technique for fixing knowledge and thoughts during the conference - we specifically put it at the beginning of the day.
Continue the topic Grigory PetrovWhich about the results of 15 years of experience in structuring personal knowledge in programming languages and general issues of self-development. After trying different tools, languages, and notepads, he decided to create his own indexing system and his own Xi markup language. This personal database is constantly updated a little bit, 5-10 edits a day.
The author claims that he speaks a dozen programming languages at an average level and is able to restore these skills in his head in a couple of hours of reading his notes. Don't forget to ask Gregory how much effort it takes to get this system to bear fruit and, of course, if he has any plans to share such a rich collection of notes.
By the way, Gregory wrote for , you can try to use his system now and come to the conference with specific proposals.
Internal and external training, motivation for knowledge sharing
The most voluminous block of reports in terms of the amount of material was formed around the topic of organizing internal and external training for employees in IT companies.
A powerful start to the topic will give Nikita Sobolev from wemake.services with report "How to teach programmers in the 21st century". Nikita how to organize training for “real IT people”, motivated and developing professionals in the company, how “not to teach by force”, but to make training the only way to continue to work successfully.
Continuing the theme of internal and external learning Alexandra Orlova, managing partner of the Stratoplan project group "Online training in communications and soft skills: formats and practices". Alexander will talk about eight training formats that the school has tried since 2010, compare their effectiveness and talk about how to choose an effective training model for IT specialists, how to involve and keep employees inside the training material.
Then its success story in the organization of training Anna Tarasenko, CEO of 7bits, which has made employee training practically a part of the business model. Faced with the problem of hiring specialists of the required level after universities, Anna decided and created within the company what universities failed to do - a self-sustaining (because graduates of the training program themselves teach the new generation) training system in an IT company. Of course, it was not without difficulties, pitfalls, problems with retention and motivation, as well as investment of resources, we will learn about all this from the report.
How e-learning and the knowledge management system are interconnected will tell Elena Tikhomirova, independent expert and author of Living Learning: What is e-learning and how to make it work. Elena about the whole arsenal of tools: curated content, storytelling, internal course development, training programs based on materials from existing knowledge bases, an awareness support system, and how to integrate them into a single system.
Mikhail Ovchinnikov, the author of online university courses for IT specialists Skillbox, will try to generalize his experience and how to design a good course, keep the attention of students so that their motivation does not fall below the baseboard, and they reach the end, how to add practice, what tasks should be. Michael's report will be useful for both potential course authors and companies that choose an external provider or want to create their own internal online learning system.
Technologies and knowledge management tools. Knowledge Bases
In parallel, for those who choose technologies and tools for knowledge management, we have compiled a track of several reports.
Alexandra White from google to How to Create Compelling Multimedia Documentation talk about how to use video and other multimedia formats for the benefit of knowledge management in a team, and not just for fun.
Several reports on the creation and structuring of knowledge bases will perfectly support the topic of technology. Let's start with a report Ekaterina Gudkova from BIOCAD “Developing a company knowledge base that is really used”. Ekaterina on the experience of a large company from the field of biological technologies how to design a knowledge base based on the needs of an employee and his tasks at different stages of the life cycle, how to understand what content is needed in it and what is not, how to improve the “recoverability”, how to motivate an employee to use the database.
Then Roman Khorin from digital agency Atman opposite not to bother with the tools and will show how to use a convenient tool that was not originally intended for storing knowledge, namely the Trello kanban service.
Finally, the Maria Smirnova, head of Ozon's technical writers team "Knowledge Management in Rapid Company Growth" will talk about how over the past year they managed to go a long way to restore order in the knowledge base of a large company with the speed of change as in a startup. The coolest thing is that Maria will talk about what they did wrong and what they would have done differently if they started now, so that you can not repeat these mistakes, but anticipate them.
In the next article, we will talk about another experimental format that will deepen and reveal the topic of technologies and tools in the service of knowledge management and, we hope, will initiate positive changes in our field.
Recruitment and training of knowledge management professionals
Unexpectedly for us, a very good pool of reports has gathered on how to hire, train or grow individual knowledge management specialists from within the company. Yes, not all companies have them yet, but listening to the reports will be useful for those companies in which this role is distributed between team leaders and team members.
Independent Knowledge Management Expert Maria Marinicheva в "10 competencies and 6 roles of a KM manager: find it in the market or educate yourself" he will talk about what set of competencies a knowledge manager should have, how to quickly find him in the market or grow him from within the company, and, most interestingly, how to prevent common mistakes when looking for a knowledge manager.
Denis Volkov, Senior Lecturer, Department of Information Systems Management and Programming, PRUE. G.V. Plekhanov about how to train knowledge management specialists, what competencies they need to instill and how to teach them, at what level is the training of knowledge management specialists in Russian universities now and on the horizon of 3-5 years. The author of the report works every day with representatives of generation Z, with those whom you and I will soon have to hire, do not miss the opportunity to listen to how they think, what they want and how they learn first-hand.
Finally, the Tatyana Gavrilova, Professor of the Graduate School of Management of St. Petersburg State University in “How to make an analyst out of a manager: the experience of training knowledge engineers” he will talk about practical methods of structuring and visualizing knowledge, and then he will come to an important issue: what personal, psychological and, most importantly, cognitive characteristics should a person responsible for organizing knowledge in a company have. Do not be embarrassed by the extremely broad word analyst, in this context it means “a person who knows how to draw up requirements for a knowledge organization system, translate from a development language into a business language.”
Great addition to the theme Olga Iskandirova from the Open Portal agency "Designing performance indicators of the knowledge management department". Olga will give examples of business performance indicators for knowledge management. The report will be useful both for companies that have already made a couple of approaches to the implementation of knowledge management techniques and now want to add performance metrics to this in order to justify the idea from a business point of view, and for those who are just starting to think about applying practices - you can attach to the process metrics in advance and, thus, it is better to sell the idea to management.
The conference will be held 26 April 2019 at Infoprostranstve at Moscow, 1st Zachatievsky pereulok, 4, next to the metro stations Kropotkinskaya and Park Kultury.
See you at ! Follow the news on Habré, in and ask questions at .
If you still did not decide to buy a ticket or did not have time before the price increase (the next one, by the way, will be on April 1, and this is not a joke), did not help convince management or simply cannot attend the conference in person, there are several ways to hear the reports:
- buy access to the broadcast, individual or corporate;
- wait until we start uploading videos from the conference to the public on Youtube, but this will happen no earlier than in six months;
- we will also continue to publish transcripts of selected reports.
Source: habr.com