👣 🤱🏼 👩🏿‍🚀 Without knowledge management it hurts: 5 main consequences of the lack of a system 🚥 🤶 🤴🏽

Toyota is a world leader in the automotive industry, one of the most expensive automotive brands and synonymous with the word “quality”. Toyota is known for its sophisticated manufacturing system, thanks to which it has become a world leader. It took 10 years and 20 versions to describe it; as a result, the Toyota Philosophy 2001 document appeared. Some of the principles in this book — kaizen and kanban — are used in IT. But these principles are only part of a system of continuous learning and continuous improvement, which is tightly integrated into all processes of the corporation.

The training system has many different principles and techniques. For example, before developing a new model, Toyota engineers study the advanced developments of suppliers and competitors' technologies: disassemble their cars, study and fix successful technical solutions. At the same time, not only engineers are trained, but the whole company. For this, checklists, quality matrices, retrospectives, skill tables, standards databases and all past projects are used. All this helps to maintain and systematize knowledge, grow, learn and produce quality products. In other words, Toyota has an almost perfect knowledge management system. Therefore they are leaders.

The Toyota story is a great example of knowledge management. But what will happen if knowledge is not managed and the system is not built? Bicycles, broken conveyors, buses, “burning” money on onboarding and legacy - all this happens to companies when they do not think about knowledge management.

Knowledge is interaction

First, let's define the term “knowledge”. He has different definitions in the IT community.

Knowledge = Confluence (JIRA, Notion or another system)? Gathering knowledge is important, but these are not equivalent concepts. If knowledge is Confluence, then knowledge management (KM) is Confluence management?

Knowledge = experience? Experience is what we passed through, reflexed, and based on it we solve current problems. But if knowledge is experience, then knowledge management is experience management?

Knowledge = documentation: knowledge bases, FTP with documents, Word or Google documents? No, documents are part of knowledge management: gained experience, described, added to the document. The document itself is useless if it lies on the server and is not used.

None of these definitions are complete. To understand what knowledge is, you have to run a little ahead. Let's see how, schematically, knowledge and its management are imagined where it is actively used - in many Western companies: McDonalds, NASA, Oracle, Ford, Microsoft Services.

The scheme of knowledge management (dimensions of knowledge management).

Here, neither documents, nor experience, nor the knowledge base are highlighted separately. But there is: change management, organizational effectiveness, productivity, intellectual capital (for which we receive money). If we summarize everything on the diagram, then we will see the skill and experience of employees who use both experience and the knowledge base and everything else. Hence the definition of "knowledge."

Knowledge is the interaction of information, skill and experience of experts.

Now consider what is “knowledge management”.

Knowledge management is a process

You participated and are participating in knowledge management every day.

At work, tell your colleagues something about a new Kubernetes article or learn from them how to close tasks faster.
Raise children, learn to read, write, switch to green and respect elders.
Classes at school and institute - transfer of knowledge from teacher to students.
Onboarding: introducing newcomers to traditions, evacuation plans, rally rules and work tasks.

All these are natural processes of managing, transmitting and receiving knowledge. We fix that knowledge management is a process .

Natural processes work, but unstable, because they are not systematized and random. The result from random processes is also random and unpredictable. The processes begin to give a stable result when the company understands that with the help of information, knowledge and experience of internal experts it is possible to solve problems more efficiently.

Effective solutions help create new products, improve old ones and increase customer satisfaction. When a support service answers questions faster and more accurately, solves user problems, there are fewer dissatisfied customers. This reduces user churn, which improves financial performance.

Knowledge management is the processes of processing, managing and using the knowledge and experience of employees (internal experts) to effectively solve problems.

What happens without knowledge management

Natural processes do not raise any questions. Questions arise when the task arises to systematize natural processes so that they benefit companies in money. As if, at this time, some social part of the brain is disconnected and the leadership is trying to understand: “Why is this all?”

To understand the “Why”, consider what we lose if we do not implement it.

Do not have time

Coding Sans conducted a study in European IT companies. Employees were asked one question: "What is the main challenge in the field of software development for you?" A fifth of the respondents in various posts indicated that this was an exchange of knowledge. This is the second result after “capacity” - the ability to solve more problems in less time.

But more interesting is the comparison of voices between those who write the code and their managers.

The first three positions: capacity, KM and hiring new talents.

Blue bar - managers, yellow - developers. The difference between the values is almost a third in relative terms. It turns out that developers are more important channel for knowledge management .

It's more important for managers to keep up. Usually, for this they “throw” tasks with people: they turn to HR, hire more developers ( see the third column ) and wait for the tasks to close on time.

Even if the recruiter collects all the cream of the market, the problem will not go anywhere. Developers have no way to quickly obtain information in order to quickly close tasks, so the problem will arise again, but on a larger scale. This is an endless cycle of samsara, from which the manager himself will not quit.

Invent bicycles

Try to audit the last 20 projects in the company. Most likely, you will see that most small problems are solved the same way. But all the decisions took time: to research, experiment and reinvent the wheel.

Let's go back to the automakers - imagine a spherical company in a vacuum that designs and manufactures cars. For example, a few years ago the company released an SUV and it was time to update it - it is outdated. What will be more expensive: to start a project anew, to design, develop and release a car from scratch, or to develop on the basis of an already created model?

In the second scenario, Renault operates. The company has a universal platform B0 - a set of common parts from which the car is assembled according to standard design solutions. Renault builds Logan, Sandero, Duster, and even trucks on the B0. It is also used in Nissan and Lada. The platform (a set of parts and standard solutions) allows you to save resources using previous developments, and not to "cycle" each new model from scratch.

We get under the buses

Just like in IT, in the real sector there is a problem with turnover. But not because people quit - they retire. The demographic picture is shifting toward retirees: fewer young, more older. At the same time, the older generation has a unique experience that companies are losing.

For a plant that produces 13 million steel a year, even a simple day is a loss of millions of dollars.

In IT, the situation is similar, despite technological effectiveness: employees leave, their knowledge is not saved, and companies suffer losses that are even difficult to calculate.

Losing money on onboarding

A new employee always costs money - from several tens to hundreds of thousands of rubles . Where does this figure come from?

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All this adds up to tangible figures. Therefore, beginners always strive to bring to production facilities as quickly as possible. But all desire is broken on the granite of onboarding. How is it usually arranged?

On the first day, a person receives a 200-page document:

- Read, everything is described here. If something is not clear, Oleg is sitting in the next office, you will recognize him. But only he works three days out of five on a remote site.

“Who is Oleg, where to find him, how to read it all?” and many other thoughts arise in the beginner's neurons. He is stressed, does not have time to understand the project, but the main thing is that he has an unpleasant impression about your company. In a couple of months you will be onboard a new person.

Suffering from legacy

There are those who have not worked with him - you are happy people. For those who worked, shake hands and sympathize. Legacy hurts.

Consider two typical legacy cases that cause suffering.

We saw a monolith . About 10 years ago, someone wrote something, but he has not been in the company for a long time. But there is a task to deal with legacy-code, for example, but this is impossible, because nothing is described. Developers feel that soon it will hurt, and the leadership - that it will come out more expensive than the code originally cost.

Custom software development. Part of the code was written by a third-party contractor and after five years you needed to optimize or integrate all this. But the contractor is no longer there. The bus factor appeared, only on a company scale.