VI #004: Scale and Empower Your Engineering Teams: 4 Practical Steps to Better Knowledge Management

Read time: 6 minutes

Implementing an effective system for knowledge management (KM) is essential to scaling an organization successfully.

Setting up a knowledge management system (KMS) can have many benefits for your team and company, such as increased productivity, improved communication, and streamlined processes. Unfortunately, many new engineering leaders don’t know where to start or struggle with setting up an effective system for their team.

Here are a few other reasons people don't learn how to or struggle to make actionable progress on a KMS:

• Not understanding the fundamentals and value of KM
• Lacking the time to set up and maintain a system, or overcomplicating it
• Not having the resources to invest in a system
• Failing to successfully get buy-in from their team

In this article, we’ll look at how to overcome these challenges and set up a KM process and system for your team and company. Here's how, step by step:

Understanding KM fundamentals

Fundamentally, KM is about:

💡 discovering, capturing, organizing, sharing, and applying the collective knowledge of an organization or team to help achieve their goals, in a cost-effective way.

This is often achieved by setting up a KMS, to store and organize information, creating a knowledge base, and implementing a knowledge management process. At a high level, to design a comprehensive KMS it can be helpful to understand the different types of knowledge:

Knowledge types. Image by Fons Wijnhoven via ResearchGate

And to ensure a KMS addresses relevant all KM processes as needed (discovery, capture, sharing, and application):

A detailed view of KM solutions. Image by Irma Becerra-Fernandez

Step 1. Define the goals and scope

The first step to setting up a KMS is to define the scope of what you wish to accomplish.

This includes identifying the areas of your team and company that will benefit from a KMS, and determining the specific goals and objectives you want to achieve. Some example goals you might want to pursue include:

• Improving collaboration and communication among team members via a centralized platform
• Streamlining onboarding via training materials and knowledge bases
• Increasing productivity via issue and feature request tracking
• Enhancing a team’s skills and reducing reliance on key members via knowledge sharing sessions and a centralized repository; or
• Improving customer support via a system for customer inquiries and requests.

Generally speaking, it can be helpful to keep the goal and scope narrow to begin, prioritizing the most critical needs first, releasing to a pilot group of users, receiving feedback, and building from there using an agile approach.

Step 2: Identify the right tools and technologies

Many new engineering leaders go wrong when it comes to this second step by choosing the wrong tools and technologies for their team.

For illustration, my teams and I have worked successfully with the following tools, though there are many options available. It's important to do your research and choose a system that is easy to use, integrates well with your existing tools and technologies, and meets your team’s specific needs:

Some quick tips:

• Consider using open source or off-the-shelf rather than building a KMS for internal use. There are a lot of great mature tools available, such as those from Atlassian.
• Standardize and/or integrate KM tools to help streamline discovery and sharing, such as via hyperlinks or syncing
• Ensure repositories and knowledge bases are searchable and accessible, to improve discoverability
• Keep up-to-date with KMS-relevant technology trends, particularly advancements in AI/ML such as language models and chatbots. These can potentially help simplify discovery, aid content creation, strengthen collaboration, and amplify team learning and skills.

Step 3: Get buy-in from your team and implement a MVP

Involve your team in defining the scope and goals of your knowledge management system (KMS) and selecting the right tools.

This will increase their buy-in and usage of the system. Then, implement a minimally viable KMS and ensure clear communication, support, and training for your team. As your organization grows, KM may need to become more structured and it may help to encourage staff to use appropriate tools for different types of knowledge. Done well, this can drive productivity and reduce waste, such as "this could've been an email" meetings. For example:

• Email, chat, video, in-person discussions: keeping these for ephemeral discussions or announcements
• Knowledge to refer back on in future e.g. decisions & status reports: Instead of email or chat, consider putting these in the project management tool or wiki.
• Long chat threads on work items such as bugs or projects: build discipline to create issue tracking tickets and put comments there, where history is maintained and discoverable
• Over time, standardize templates for knowledge capture: For quality and efficiency. Make these templates discoverable and sharable. Tools such as Confluence make this easy

To drive adoption, focus on ease-of-use and embedding KM into how your team does their work.

For example, using “self-documenting” and automated workflows such as infrastructure-as-code, build and test automation, and integrating customer support tickets with issue tracking, project management, and source control. Investing in your team’s tooling is worthwhile, especially when focusing on keeping overall cognitive overload of your KMS low for staff. Done well, it can have a huge impact on productivity and scalability, and your team will thank you.

Following this approach, you can set up a KMS that works for your team and company, unlock the benefits that come with it, and avoid unnecessarily large investments in time, effort, and resources.

Step 4: Pilot, get feedback, and iterate

Once you've implemented your KMS, pilot it with a small group of users before rolling it out more widely.

Gather feedback on usability, accessibility, and effectiveness, identifying any gaps and training needs. Iterate on the system and process based on feedback and any metrics that may be available. When appropriate, roll out the system and process with training and support.

Knowledge management is an ongoing process, so it’s important to regularly review and update the system and process, and encourage team members to continuously share and contribute new knowledge. Over time, you may also wish to refer to a KM Maturity Model to help assess and guide progress.

Recap

Implementing an effective KMS is essential to scale an organization, and can empower teams to find innovative solutions and win more business. It can improve competitive advantage, productivity, and make employees happier and more effective. To set up a KM system and process, understand KM fundamentals and follow these steps:

1. Define the goals and scope of your KMS
2. Identify the right tools and technologies
3. Get buy-in from your team and implement a MVP
4. Pilot, get feedback, and iterate

I hope this helps. See you next Sunday. 

Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:

1. Work with me 1:1 to build your team, product, platform, or career in tech.
2. Book a free discovery call with me to explore if your business needs would be a good fit for my advisory services. If we’re not a good fit, rest assured I’ll kindly let you know.