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Harry Klein is an American psychologist, researcher of intuitive solutions in extreme situations. In his book Sources of Power, Klein described one case: a fire brigade came to a call, a kitchen was burning in a residential building. The team entered the room and began to extinguish the fire, but it did not die out. At some point, the commander felt anxiety and ordered an urgent departure. When everyone left the house, the floor in the kitchen failed. It turned out that the fire started in the basement, and then spread to the top, so it was not possible to extinguish it in the kitchen.



Later, Harry Klein interviewed the commander to collect material for the book and managed to take his intuitive solution to pieces: the fire in the kitchen was weak, but there was too much heat and smoke for such a flame. The commander felt that the situation was dangerous and withdrew the team. This is an example of “implicit knowledge” that is hidden so deeply that it appears only in a real situation.

Pulling out “implicit knowledge” that is especially helpful in emergency situations is one of the tasks of a knowledge management manager. For example, production has fallen, the servers refuse to work, but no one knows why. At the same time, something similar happened six months ago and Petya solved the problem: he “played a prank”, twisted it, and it worked. True, Petya left for another company, but they didn’t carry out a retrospective, they didn’t add the incident and solution to the knowledge base, because there is no base either. But if the team had a knowledge manager, perhaps the consequences would be less, and the problem would be solved faster.

The knowledge manager is not a position, but a function


A knowledge manager is a person who organizes the conditions so that the individual knowledge of experts and the experience of the company are not lost, analyzed and used to effectively solve problems. For example, Microsoft Services has a separate position for this - the Director of Knowledge Management (Chief Knowledge Officer), which manages a separate unit. The director has many powers: he can sell the services of the unit to other departments, buy equipment or develop software from other departments and manages a separate budget. 

The basis of the knowledge management system (KM) in Microsoft Services is a community of practitioners who have been working since 2005. There are more than 100 communities, and several thousand experts. The developer or product manager does not need to google or take time from colleagues: in the community in a minute he will find an expert on any topic, ask a question and get an answer.

A similar system works in CROC - an IT company that is professionally engaged in knowledge management. With the help of communities, almost the entire ecosystem of company knowledge is created. This is necessary according to the specifics of the work: CROC is a consulting company and sells the knowledge of its experts. A group is created for each activity in the company (project, presentation, research), and all the information is received in it: materials, project ideas, correspondence.



Microsoft Services and CROC have great knowledge management systems. Big systems are not needed to start introducing individual practices from knowledge management in your company. It is enough to start small. For example, with five simple (relatively) practices that solve typical business problems. 

Knowledge base


The knowledge base is the first and easiest to manage knowledge. It helps a lot for support services or call centers, and is indispensable for companies with bicycles .

“As the chief architect of many projects, along with other initiative people, I created a comprehensive documentation system. Initially - in SGML, with source codes under the version control system and automatic assembly of RTF and CHM updates every night, and later based on wiki-systems (approximately 2005).

In the knowledge base, we added description templates, typical examples, and various diagrams. For documentation used comments as a basis. The base has not only been preserved in the company so far, but is also maintained and developed by the project teams by default. ”

Maxim Tsepkov
Architect and business analyst, Agile world navigator, turquoise organizations and spiral dynamics, member of KnowledgeConf 2020.

Note. For more information about which documents are useful in knowledge management and what to fix in them, read the decoding of Maxim's report on Teamlead Conf 2018.

Here the KM manager works as an architect: he is responsible for planning and developing the knowledge base infrastructure, for the structure and hierarchy of documents. To prevent edits, comments and duplicates from accumulating in the database, sets general rules.

For example, a technical writer can take on this role in a company and write scripts and any other artifacts for a knowledge management system. Writers usually know how to work with algorithms, instructions, regulations, and business processes.



Project office


The project office is an “expanded" knowledge base. Accepted and unaccepted decisions, and the reasons for which they are selected or discarded, are added to the office.

Someone will encounter a problem, find the reason, solve it and write it all down to the database, and the next employee will solve the same problem faster. Time for research, tests and hypotheses is less - time2market is reduced .

For a project office, simple document management systems, such as Google Drive, are suitable. In it you can exchange documents, issue access rights and add comments.

“A project office is not just a knowledge base. For him, I analyzed what is happening in the projects, conducted interviews with the developers and gathered generalized experience. On this basis, I wrote articles, instructions and described product development practices. ”

Svetlana Novikova
Head of the group of technical writers at Ozon. The Write the Docs Russia community activist, a member of KnowledgeConf 2020, runs the @the_know_all Telegram channel.

A project office is indispensable when there is a lot of legacy in a project . In a customized project office, it’s easy to see why certain technologies were chosen, why every piece of code or crutches was added. After updating parts of the code, all changes are also easy to add to the database for the next "generation" of developers.

“When I was the Technical Director before Flant, I trained the development department from scratch to document. Up-to-date architectural documents by API were put into a separate repository on GitLab. If necessary, it is easy to figure out what requirements each line of code grows in. This helped eliminate conflicts between development and Q&A, because everyone understood the reasons for all decisions.

In Flant, he expanded this idea: he organized the storage of documentation in GitLab, taught people how to use it, developed the principles of sharing knowledge in the form of key instructions and made it work. ”

Igor Tsupko
Director for Unknown at Flant, a member of KnowledgeConf 2020, hosts the Telegram channel @lovely_it_hell.



Competency Map


A card or matrix of competencies is a tool for advanced training and its control. Usually it looks like a table: the names of the employees in rows, and in the columns what they know.


An example of the matrix is ​​from the article “ Dragons Live Here: The Matrix of Competencies as a Tool of Timlid .”

The table clearly shows the failures in employee training. Shows who is the main carrier of a certain skill (which then transfers it to others), and who is just an ordinary user. A competency map can be made up of a team lead or technical lead to assess the level of team developers.

“Prior to Flant, I was CTO at the development company. I wanted the team to grow and solve problems more difficult, and employees to improve their skills. This required transparent growth rules, feedback. This helped the matrix of competencies.

But the matrix is ​​not suitable for everyone. At Flant, she did not work for DevOps engineers, because from dozens of technologies and hundreds of nuances it would “swell” to enormous size. So I upgraded the matrix in Performance Review . This is already a process that allows us to identify systematic problems with the recruitment, adaptation and growth of employees. ”

Igor Tsupko
Director for Unknown at Flant, a member of KnowledgeConf 2020, hosts the Telegram channel @lovely_it_hell.



Adaptation Checklists


Hiring a new employee is always worth the money. The costs consist of the time and salaries of an HR or recruiter, managers (team leader, technical expert, CTO) and everyone else who is involved in hiring. When an employee comes to the company, time and effort is spent on onboarding. 

Therefore, one of the tasks of the knowledge manager is to gently and painlessly introduce a new employee to work so that he does not “get lost” during the test period. For example, new Toyota employees work under the supervision of more experienced comrades. When the corporation opens a new plant, then a detachment of the best workers and newcomers is sent to it. After some time, experienced employees come back, and beginners continue to work.

“He organized a knowledge management community and held meetings with colleagues at which we found, in particular, problems with onboarding and worked out a solution strategy. For example, we have introduced a general introductory program for all employees. It included general knowledge and practices: task tracker, Wiki, general technologies. The program was applied by the company’s specialized structures, which helped them increase the percentage of employees who passed the probationary period. ”

Maxim Tsepkov
Architect and business analyst, navigator around the world of Agile, turquoise organizations and spiral dynamics, a member of KnowledgeConf 2020.

You can improve onboarding today. Assign a new employee to record their actions and learning path. It will not cost you anything. All the following newcomers will follow his path, add and supplement the document. When you see your processes through the eyes of a beginner, you will see his path and prepare a “checklist” of adaptation.


An example of a checklist from the decoding of a report by Alexei Petrov (QA Head of department in FunCorp) “ Adaptation checklist as a tool for soft introduction to the position ”. 



Communication cards


“When I organized the knowledge base, there were more opportunities for development, and after several internal promos I received requests to help organize KM in adjacent units. I led internal meetings on creating content for external and internal knowledge bases, shared methodology, practices, best practices with my colleagues, consulted, wrote on a blog, made contacts about contacts in different departments who could be contacted with questions (for working on SME methodology). But even after that, the most common question I was asked was: “Do you know who you can ask about ...?” :) "

Rodion Nagornov
Head of KnowledgeConf 2020, finalist of the international competition TSIA STAR AWARDS 2018 in the nomination Innovation in Knowledge Management with knowledge management projects at Kaspersky Lab.

Even with an advanced knowledge management system, communication is a sore point. In a large company, horizontal connections are usually poorly developed: asking a colleague from a neighboring department is already a problem. A communications map will help here - a list of company employees or teams with positions, contacts and areas of responsibility.

For a communications card, simply upgrade the competency matrix. Vertically Names of employees, positions and contacts, horizontally - an area of ​​knowledge, competencies with which they can help.



How to implement a knowledge management system


Start implementing individual knowledge management practices in your company today. Build on a specific business problem that you can solve with knowledge management tools. For example, organize a local (team) knowledge base in Google Docs.

Present the local solution to the problem. Tell us how the database helped to quickly close the project or do it with less expense in the language of numbers. Then ask management to scale the solution to other departments. So, in small steps, implement knowledge management.

You don’t even need to hire an individual for this. For example, CROC has a head of the “Knowledge and Corporate Communications Management” direction (Alexey Sidorin), but there is no separate team that is responsible for the knowledge base.

The company has many internal corporate systems. The command of each system adds information to the database separately. Each employee performs part of the functions of a knowledge manager. This is convenient for two reasons.

UZ is long, expensive and complicated . This is a process that includes the collection of knowledge, change management, sociology, analytics, a little knowledge of the architect, developer, manager and designer. One person cannot be an expert in everything, so it’s easier to include all employees in the knowledge management. Developers add documentation to the knowledge base, managers - the history of projects, testers - what problems were found and how they were solved.

For small and medium-sized companies it is cheaper: you don’t need to allocate a budget for an individual employee, it is enough to distribute a few new functions and roles on the current ones. It’s more convenient to “blur” the functions of the manager for several people: someone manages business processes, someone acts as an expert, someone collects it all into one database.

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