Ask HN: Workplace has Poor Knowledge Management – How to deal with it? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Workplace has Poor Knowledge Management – How to deal with it?

13 pointsrc51501 comment

Hi all,

I got a pretty decent desktop support gig a few months ago and while on the whole it's been pretty great, I feel like my development is stagnating because the place has pisspoor knowledge management. Every process or procedure or general knowledge/bit of info is in a series of non-curated OneNote books that are written by anyone and everyone. Furthermore, there are a million ways to do one task and everyone is certain that THEIR method is the right way.

At this point, I've dropped the ball on a few things, missed some simple steps in certain important processes because the documentation was basically written in crayon, and people are starting to resent me for having to pick up the slack when I mess up.

We are a few months away from rolling out ServiceNow and I've been granted access as Knowledge admin in effort to build out the knowledge base. This is great, but in the meantime, people think I suck, and I'm starting to believe them. Halp!

I was the NCOIC of Knowledge Management for a US Army Sustainment Command many years ago. In order for any knowledge sharing program to be effective it must be supported (strongly) by senior leadership. This is the single most important consideration to your knowledge management proposal.

In order to have a mediocre knowledge management program there must be a knowledge sharing policy, some level of enforcement, and some form of centralization. Enforcement could be as indirect as a criteria of employee annual review. The knowledge products must also be centralized, or in uniform locations, or both. They are worthless if nobody knows where they are.

An excellent knowledge management program is an essential part of the organization's culture. I really believe the only difference between a novice developer and an expert developer comes down to: writing and data structure. There is no better way to improve planning and technical writing than practice writing good documentation. Practice writing good documentation also changes how you think about code, organization, and planning.

In order to achieve an excellent knowledge management program employees should be empowered and rewarded for putting things in writing and producing excellent technical documents. Knowledge sharing must be an essential part of the organization's culture and business process. Culture comes from strong leadership at the top.

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I feel your pain. My current employer also has poor knowledge discipline. Almost nothing is in writing. The documentation is old and all over the place. It leaves you with the feeling that nobody knows that is going on. The biggest problem in this instance is that the employer is operationally focused in a very extreme way and that is the cultural quality that is most rewarded. This, in practice, means you are more rewarded for your level of involvement than for what you produce or for what you document. As a result employees strive for visibility and want to be seen as in a hurry and nothing is in writing.

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