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How does everybody do knowledge transfer and knowledge databases? Especially with a Brent from TPP.
How does everybody do knowledge transfer and knowledge databases? Especially with a Brent from TPP.
We have a knew hire starting this week and I’m looking forward to mentoring them, but I have been wondering also what is the best way to transfer knowledge for complex systems and build a better knowledge database.
When I started I was mentored by a Brent. Very smart and had great insight and knowledge into how everything connected and functioned, but had been caring that responsibility for years and had a huge work load. We kinda had to do something similar as in TPP not letting Brent fix the problems but teach and let us solve the problems to learn. This worked out pretty well for the most part besides those time bomb once in a blue moon events where it doesn’t happen for 5 years, but when it does only that one person knows what to do about it.
Over the years I have wonder what is the best approach for knowledge transfer/knowledge database/mentoring. I have create notes and standard operating procedures and documentation to help with learning the overall system, but I know there is much more I haven’t put down to pen and paper due to forgetting to due it.
I won’t say I’m a Brent, but I’m in a situation that could very much lead me to being a Brent. I try to share all my insights and knowledge with who wants to learn since I don’t want to be that one guy who only knows how to fix that situation.
For a knowledge database I have always pictured a google would be a create tool for it. Over the years there has been many documentation and all worth a read, but finding that one key piece of information out of a dozen documents can be challaning at times or knowing that keyword or exact person to contact to help get a task done. It would be nice to just type system x is having problem y and get the needed steps to fix the problem or I’m looking to do z and get the steps to do it or the person to contact.
We've been trying a team wiki and are about a year in. There's been some success in asking people to document anything they are taught. However, I'm observing information duplication across departmental silos. I'm also not convinced anyone is reading articles they are not directly pointed at. And now that documentation is aging, I don't see people going back to update it.
Agree with a need for freshness in a wiki. Out of date documentation can often be worse than none. I encourage 'how to' articles as much as possible.
I've been working on these issues within my team for the last month. Some of my conclusions: • Make editing the knowledge base dead simple, preferrably with familiar tools. We edit Markdown files, push with Git, which builds HTML that we can browse. • Consider preprocessing to avoid data duplication. I have started collecting "relevant links", and I can pull out the links I want based on tags. This should allow all relevant information to be present on a page, without duplicating the underlying information. I've found this guide to be useful: https://www.writethedocs.org/guide/docs-as-code/
I’ve started using Notion as a basis for a personal wiki However I could see it as a way to establish who has seen what (and with good docs, you could establish a good workflow for knowledge sharing/on-boarding)
Wiki here also. We use Azure Devops which will automatically format markdown files for you, so we just write markdown and push it to a repo. We also created a work item specifically for documentation and make that part of definition of done. Doesn't have to be in-depth: something is better than nothing and often a picture and a few words can go a long way. I've seen the same kind of duplication that Scott mentions, so one thing I've been trying to lobby for is to open our wiki up to the whole organization instead of just our development team. Something we're going to try to experiment with soon is gherkin syntax playing the role as tests, automated tests, user stories, and also documentation. One other thing we've started doing recently for specific and complicated tech knowledge is having a meeting on Teams about it, recording it to Microsoft Stream, and adding a link to that to docs, that way you can see the Brents solving the problem as they solve it.
Thank you all for the feedback. I have been thinking of going down the wiki route or notion too, but it does seem to take an effort to get there and dedication to keep up to date. I was leaning that way partly because its a one source of truth. Right now we have done documents, but people don't seem to want to go look for the last version of the documentation and ust ask the answer instead. Thank you again for the wonderful feedback.
one other thing we did awhile back was create a chat channel called Q&A where anyone in the company can ask a question about anything work related and anyone can answer. It was a cheap test to see if Stackoverflow Teams would be worth spending money on. I remember the SO folks at DOES 2019 saying that you could use SO Teams for free for up to 25 members though. Can’t seem to find that in their pricing unfortunately, but might be something else worth looking into. https://stackoverflow.com/teams
Had an interesting email exchange with a 3rd party health care system and our CMO yesterday. We partner with this healthcare system for some radiology and ultrasound services. The u/s techs have to manually input data in 5 different systems just to see a patient. It's atrocious. Our CMO is quite unhappy with the response from the IT & EMR teams at the health system. They make tickets and the requests get lost in the system forever. I used language and concepts from TUP/TPP to explain that to no fault of the individuals at the health system, their system of work, silos, and bureaucracy will impede at every step. I suggested forming a small team from a cross section of the various IT and EMR groups at the health system that operates outside the normal system of work. I explained the team will need support and air cover from upper management at the health system and perhaps our CMO could help us get that. She was quite happy with that suggestion. We'll see where it goes. The "Performance Engine" is really good at it's job so even our CMO may have difficulty assisting us.
Had an interesting email exchange with a 3rd party health care system and our CMO yesterday. We partner with this healthcare system for some radiology and ultrasound services. The u/s techs have to manually input data in 5 different systems just to see a patient. It's atrocious. Our CMO is quite unhappy with the response from the IT & EMR teams at the health system. They make tickets and the requests get lost in the system forever. I used language and concepts from TUP/TPP to explain that to no fault of the individuals at the health system, their system of work, silos, and bureaucracy will impede at every step. I suggested forming a small team from a cross section of the various IT and EMR groups at the health system that operates outside the normal system of work. I explained the team will need support and air cover from upper management at the health system and perhaps our CMO could help us get that. She was quite happy with that suggestion. We'll see where it goes. The "Performance Engine" is really good at it's job so even our CMO may have difficulty assisting us.