Hi all. After six months have passed, during which time I managed to speak at two more conferences and give lectures on the topic of knowledge management in two large IT companies. Communicating with colleagues, I realized that in IT it is still possible to talk about knowledge management at the “beginner” level, or rather, simply realize that knowledge management is necessary for any department of any company. Today there will be a minimum of my own experience - I would like to review the existing international standards in the field of knowledge management.
Let's start with probably the most popular brand in the field of standardization - ISO. Imagine there is a whole separate standard dedicated to knowledge management systems (ISO 30401:2018). But today I wouldn't dwell on it. Before understanding “how” a knowledge management system should look and work, we need to agree that it is, in principle, needed.
Take for example ISO 9001: 2015 (Quality management systems). As the name suggests, this is a standard dedicated to a quality management system. To be certified under this standard, an organization must ensure transparency and continuity of work processes and products and/or services produced. In other words, a certificate means that everything in your company is working smoothly, smoothly, you understand what risks the current organization of processes carries, you know how to control these risks, and strive to minimize them.
What is knowledge management about? And here's what:
7.1.6 Organizational knowledge
The organization shall determine the knowledge necessary to operate its processes and to achieve conformity of products and services.
Knowledge must be maintained and made available to the extent necessary.
In considering changing needs and trends, the organization should take into account its existing knowledge and determine how to obtain or provide access to additional knowledge and its updating.
NOTE 1 Organizational knowledge is organization-specific knowledge; mostly based on experience.
Knowledge is information that is used and shared to achieve organizational goals.
NOTE 2 An organization's knowledge base can be:
a) internal sources (e.g. intellectual property; knowledge gained from experience; lessons learned from unsuccessful or successful projects; collection and sharing of undocumented knowledge and experience; results of process, product and service improvements);
b) external sources (eg standards, academia, conferences, knowledge from customers and external providers).
And below, in applications:
Organizational knowledge requirements have been introduced to:
a) protecting the organization from loss of knowledge, for example due to:
- staff turnover;
- the impossibility of obtaining and exchanging information;
b) encouraging the organization to acquire knowledge, for example through:
- learning by doing;
- mentoring;
- benchmarking.
So, the ISO standard in the field of quality management states that in order to ensure the quality of its activities, an enterprise must engage in knowledge management. That's right, no alternative - "must". Otherwise nonconformity, and goodbye. This fact alone, as it were, hints that this is not an optional aspect in the organization, as knowledge management in IT is often treated, but a mandatory component of business processes.
Moreover, the standard tells what risks knowledge management is designed to eliminate. In fact, they are quite obvious.
Let's imagine... no, it's not like that - please remember a situation from your career when you really needed some information at work, and its only carrier was at that moment on vacation / business trip, quit the company altogether or was just sick. Remembered? I think almost all of us have experienced this. What did you feel at that moment?
If after some time the management of the unit will analyze the failure of the project deadlines, it will, of course, find the culprit and calm down on this. But at the moment when knowledge was needed, it didn’t help you personally to understand that “RM is to blame, who left for Bali and did not leave any instructions in case of questions.” Certainly he is to blame. But it won't help you solve your problem.
If knowledge is documented in a system accessible to people who may need it, then the described “resort” story becomes almost impossible. Thus, the continuity of business processes is ensured, which means that vacations, departures of employees and the very notorious bus factor are not terrible for the enterprise - the quality of the product / service will remain at its usual level.
If a company has a platform for the exchange and storage of information and experience, and a culture (habit) of using this platform has been formed, then employees do not have to wait several days for a response from a colleague (or even look for this colleague for several days) and put because of this to hold your tasks.
Why am I talking about habit? Because it is not enough to create a knowledge base for people to start using it. We are all used to searching Google for answers to our questions, and the intranet is most often associated with vacation applications and the bulletin board. We don't have the habit of "looking for information about Agile frameworks" (for example) on the intranet. Therefore, even if we have the coolest knowledge base in one second, no one will start using it the next second (and even the next month) - there is no habit. Changing your habits is painful and time consuming. Not everyone is ready for this. Especially if for 15 years "and they worked the same way." But without this, the company's knowledge initiative will fail. That is why masters of KM inextricably link knowledge management with change management.
It is also worth paying attention to the fact that “When considering changing needs and trends, an organization must take into account its existing knowledge ...”, i.e. develop a culture of referring to previous experience when making decisions in a changing world. And notice again "should".
By the way, this small paragraph of the standard says a lot about experience. Usually, when it comes to knowledge management, stereotypes begin to slip a picture of a knowledge base with hundreds of documents placed in the form of files (regulations, requirements). But ISO talks about experience. The knowledge gained from the past experience of the company and each of its employees is the very thing that allows you to avoid the risk of repeating mistakes, immediately make better decisions and even create a new product. In the most mature companies in the field of knowledge management (including Russian ones, by the way), knowledge management is seen as a means of increasing the company's capitalization, creating new products, developing new ideas and optimizing processes. It's not a knowledge base, it's a mechanism for innovation. It helps us to understand this in more detail. PMI PMBOK Guidelines.
PMBOK is a guide to the project management body of knowledge, the PMa Handbook. The sixth edition (2016) of this guide introduces a section on project integration management, which in turn includes a section on project knowledge management. This item was created "based on comments from users of the manual", i.e. has become a product of experience in using previous versions of the guide in real conditions. And reality demanded knowledge management!
The main output of the new item is the “Lessons Learned Register” (in the ISO standard described above, by the way, it is also mentioned). Moreover, according to the guidelines, the compilation of this register should be carried out throughout the implementation of the project, and not at its completion, when it comes time to analyze the result. In my opinion, this is very similar to retrospectives in agile, but I will write a separate post about this. Literally, the text in PMBOK sounds like this:
Project knowledge management is the process of using existing knowledge and creating new knowledge to achieve project objectives and promote learning within the organization.
The project integration management knowledge area requires the integration of the results obtained in all other knowledge areas.
Emerging trends in integration processes include, among others:
...
• Project knowledge management
The increasingly mobile and changing nature of the workforce also requires a more rigorous process of capturing knowledge throughout the life cycle of a project and transferring it to target audiences in a way that prevents knowledge loss.
***
The key benefits of this process are that the previously acquired knowledge of the organization is used to achieve or improve the results of the project, and the knowledge gained during the implementation of the current project remains available to support the organization's operations and future projects or their phases. This process is carried out throughout the project.
I will not copy-paste the entire large section of the manual here. You can read it yourself and draw the appropriate conclusions. The quotes above are sufficient in my opinion. It seems to me that the presence of such a specification of the task of the RM for project knowledge management already indicates the importance of this aspect when working on projects. By the way, I often hear the thesis: “Who needs our knowledge in other departments?” That is, who needs these lessons learned?
In fact, it is often seen that a unit views itself as a "unit in a vacuum". Here we are with our library, but there is the rest of the company, and knowledge about our library will not be useful to her in any way. About the library - perhaps. What about related processes?
A banal example: in the course of work on a project, there was interaction with a contractor. For example, with a designer. The contractor turned out to be so-so, missed the deadlines, refused to finalize without additional payment. RM recorded in the register of lessons learned that it is not worth working with this unreliable contractor. At the same time, somewhere in marketing they were also looking for a designer and came across the same contractor. And at this point there are two options:
a) If the company has a good culture of reuse of experience, a marketing colleague will look in the lessons learned register if someone has already contacted this contractor, see negative feedback from our PM and will not waste time and money communicating with this unreliable contractor.
b) if the company does not have such a culture, the marketer will turn to the same unreliable contractor, lose the company's money, time, and may disrupt an important and urgent promotional campaign, for example.
Which option seems more successful? And note that it was not information about the product under development that was useful, but about the accompanying development processes. And it turned out to be useful not to another RM, but to an employee of a completely different direction. Hence the conclusion: it is impossible to consider development separately from sales, technical support from business intelligence, and IT from ACS. Everyone in the company has work experience that will prove useful to someone else in the company. And it is not at all necessary that they will be representatives of related areas.
However, the technical side of the project may come in handy. Try auditing projects in your company over the past few years. You'd be surprised how many bicycles have been invented for similar problems. Why? Because knowledge sharing processes are not established.
So, knowledge management, according to the PMI manual, is one of the tasks of the PM. As you can see, two well-known organizations that conduct paid certifications according to their standards include knowledge management in the list of must-have tools for quality control and project work. Why do managers in IT companies still believe that knowledge management is documentation? Why do the cooler and the smoking room remain the centers of knowledge exchange? It's all about understanding and habits. I hope that gradually the understanding of the field of knowledge management will become more and more among IT managers, and the oral tradition will cease to serve as a tool for preserving knowledge in the company. Study the standards of your work - they have a lot of interesting things!
Source: habr.com