NextGen > Team Knowledge Transfer Plan
Why
Knowledge transfer is a must during product retirement. This process involves both documentation and learning of both tacit and implicit knowledge that the team has gathered over time. First, processes and tools need to be placed to record both technical and domain knowledge. Then, learning and getting new team members up to speed quickly with all relevant information should be facilitated.
There are many reasons to justify why a knowledge transfer plan is crucial.
- Knowledge transfer is essential for business continuity. Knowledge must be transferred to the new team to make sure they can function independently. A proper focus needs to be given for knowledge retention, or knowledge needs to be documented to further move away from any people dependencies.
- A decent knowledge transfer plan can easily accelerate learning across the board. This enables fast onboarding at any time of the product life cycle, not just in the retire stage. This could be the default for team training.
- Consider a high investment in this strategic area especially if your team is distributed (which is not co-located). A proper knowledge transfer process could become the only effective way of learning if the interaction between people is limited in a distributed team setup. Moreover, the use of a modern knowledge transfer tool will enable you to bridge any language and culture gaps.
- • A less prominent advantage of a knowledge transfer process is better collaboration. Although not a directly relevant topic here, you can use strategic activities to your advantage when building a new team.
How
Consider the following to establish a good knowledge transfer plan:
- First, get proper tools in place. There are many online knowledge transfer tools available in the market. These tools ease off the process of both capturing and dissemination of knowledge. Moreover, language tools such as translations are built into them, which could help immensely if your team spans across different cultures. Research into use one of these tools is a good starting point.
- Once the knowledge is captured, do frequent learning exercises to ensure that all team members have acquired all applicable knowledge. It’s easy to absorb relevant blocks of knowledge when you only concentrate on your specialty. Though it may be the plan in a certain situation, often knowledge dissimilation across the entire team is highly recommended.
- Give incentives to speed up the learning process. Some of the learning management tools are equipped with gamification techniques that give incentives to make learning rewarding & fun; it’s worth having a look.