Successful companies institutionalize the knowledge of their employees; this leads to better continuity and faster on-boarding. Things like huge monorepos of useful code, internal tools, process manuals, etc. are example products of this. Young companies tend to depend on the dedication and talent of key individuals, and in maturation, must somehow make the jump to institutionalized knowledge (so that "if someone got hit by a bus" things are ok). What are some successful methods you have used or seen used to accomplish this transition? What are problems you faced (skeptics, opponents, etc.)? I am involved with an organization that is slowly growing, is about to lose key personnel, and is looking to prepare.
Ask HN: Good ways to capture institutional knowledge?
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Re: Ask HN: Good ways to capture institutional knowledge?
#2Wouldnt the answer be: commit these dedicated, talented, key individuals to the knowledge tranfer effort, exclusively? You're trying to prepare for losing them. So, try it out!
Pull them off, and assign them to a cushy knowledge transfer process. You'll more safely learn about your true dependencies & get some of the knowledge you want at the same time.
Re: Ask HN: Good ways to capture institutional knowledge?
#3Having a single wiki instance for your company is an awesome way to collect knowledge. You can write up operation run books, design documents, references all in an informal way.
Re: Ask HN: Good ways to capture institutional knowledge?
#4Software. Software. Software.
Encode your knowledge into software, into data structures, into tests and active documentation.
Human organisations have faced these problems for thousands of years. And never solved them well. Maybe we need the new kid on the block to help
Re: Ask HN: Good ways to capture institutional knowledge?
#5Cross training. It's easy to lose institutional knowledge when someone leaves if they are one of the only people that has worked on their projects. Much harder to lose that if you do even minimal cross training. Even if it's only once a quarter, have each person sit with someone else, have that someone else explain their job, their major projects, their details, pitfalls, strengths, etc. Lots of notes should be taken. A knowledge base should be a given, but that will only take you so far. A side benefit is such a wider picture of what's going on will better inform the work of everyone, keeping people not only on the same page, but understanding all the details of how those pages interact.
Edit: Yes, they'll hate it, but this should include a tour of duty Sales. Poor relationships & acrimony between sales & dev are based on a failure of understanding each other's jobs. And sales are the closest to the needs of customers, short of sitting with customers themselves.
Re: Ask HN: Good ways to capture institutional knowledge?
#6Have the key personnel fully participate in knowledge capture. As far as the tool to be used for capturing said knowledge, don't waste time...Just use the fastest-to-set-up and the easiest-to-set-up wiki (or something similarly fast and easy). After the key knowledge has been captured, and likely after the key people are gone, you can look to see if you even need to migrate to a different platform than the original wiki. Knowledge transfer can get tricky in general...but since you're on a time constraint (key people leaving), don't waste time with UI or prettiness, etc. Just capture all the things!
Re: Ask HN: Good ways to capture institutional knowledge?
#7Get your key knowledge holders to dedicate 20 percent of their time to documenting what they know. However, most of them are so used to knowing stuff that they aren't sure where to start or what the need is, specifically. Therefore, make them take requests from people who want to know what they know. Then what you end up with is really knowledgeable people spending 20 percent of their time asking everyone around them what they can document and documenting it. Check in every now and then and ask to see what they've come up with.
Re: Ask HN: Good ways to capture institutional knowledge?
#8The easiest way is just to make sure product/business discussions happen over email rather than Slack. This way those discussions can be searchable and discoverable by anyone within the company at any point in the future. We make software for this (FWD:Everyone), but there are dozens of other similar solutions as well. That's the great thing about email, because the standards are open you'll be able to extract more value from that same data with each passing year using products that haven't even been created yet.
Conceptually this is similar to having a wiki, except for that unless your company has people whose full time job it is to maintain the wiki then it will always be out of date and inaccurate; just deploying some wiki software tends to be pretty useless, and even in the rare cases where they are maintained the medium inherently doesn't preserve the tacit knowledge contained within the decision-making process itself.
Re: Ask HN: Good ways to capture institutional knowledge?
#9Mandatory vacation. This is something that the finance industry has used for a long time to guard against fraud -- it's hard to cover up something if someone else has to do your job for two weeks straight at some point -- but it also serves as a mechanism for requiring you to cross-train people.
Two weeks of paid vacation where the company isn't allowed to email them or call them for help: I guarantee that documentation practices will increase substantially.
Re: Ask HN: Good ways to capture institutional knowledge?
#10You’re not going to preserve their knowledge via a wiki. At best a wiki would be a snapshot in time. They’re irreplaceable knowledge is likely an understanding of how change happens within the company.
The answer is by requiring close team effort. Pair programming for example.
I’d one person leaves the organization, there should be “adjacent” employees who understand what they contributed.