Simple rule: Require that new hires should be able to become productive without having to talk to anyone (physically or electronically). The rest will fall in place.
Ask HN: Good ways to capture institutional knowledge?
11–20 of 220 posts
Re: Ask HN: Good ways to capture institutional knowledge?
#12Mandatory 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 documentat…
Some of the most “innovative” times are when someone is on parental leave.
And by innovative I mean “we have no idea how anything works - let’s fix it.”
Re: Ask HN: Good ways to capture institutional knowledge?
#13Mandatory 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 documentat…
Just like dropout in a neural network.
What is the equivalent of weight decay?
Re: Ask HN: Good ways to capture institutional knowledge?
#14The value of institutional knowledge is that it's already in someone's head. Reading documentation, searching a wiki, email archives, may be better than reinventing the wheel but the real way preserve it is retention.
I would invest in that if your are in a complicated or specialized domain where it takes months or years for someone to really get their mind around it. One thing I have noticed is that private work environments tend to be present at the low turnover environments I've seen. At least a cubicle.
Another option is extending low hour contracts to departing employees as sort of an off-ramp to their role. They are on a few hours a week or as-needed to handle the dwindling number of cases where they are most needed.
Re: Ask HN: Good ways to capture institutional knowledge?
#15The 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 v…
Why is email superior to slack (or other chat solutions)?
Re: Ask HN: Good ways to capture institutional knowledge?
#16Mandatory 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 documentat…
Just like dropout in a neural network. What is the equivalent of weight decay?
+1
throwing off 75% of knowledge increases generalization capabilities
(actual experience detecting real criminal behaviors within financial claims)
Re: Ask HN: Good ways to capture institutional knowledge?
#17The 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 v…
Why is email superior to slack (or other chat solutions)?
Can you export slack logs as plain text, or something easy to process like JSON? (Haven't used it in forever, so I don't know).
Being able to
grep -A3 -i foobox -r /nfs/info | grep -i rpc
is useful. Similarly, you can shove plaintext into a more advanced search engine easily.
Re: Ask HN: Good ways to capture institutional knowledge?
#18Strong change control processes: if you want to know why something was implemented the way it was, the ticket authorising the implementation should have all the details including test results and names for who built, who tested, and who signed off.
Re: Ask HN: Good ways to capture institutional knowledge?
#19It's a hard problem, but I've had some success with a few approaches. One is pulling the team into a conference room and giving a deep-dive presentation on some aspect of our system. I made a point of doing it via a web conference with recording enabled so someone could always go back and watch/listen to parts in a pinch.
Another is calling an impromptu huddle when I'm about to work on something that nobody else feels prepared to handle on their own. When some crazy bug crops up that I'm about to troubleshoot, I'll often ask a few other team members to shoulder surf while I talk through the approach I'm using to run the bug down. It's a great time to ask the group what they think we should do to test their knowledge.
Re: Ask HN: Good ways to capture institutional knowledge?
#20The 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 v…
I never quite understood why companies don't just setup an NNTP server with newsgroups to capture conversations, rather than email (which is difficult to search IMHO).