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Hi guys, during last two weeks I had an opportunity to catch up with a friend who works as Agile Coach. During last summer, his company had serious issues with knowledge transfer that almost forced them to close doors. In this blog, I will explain why is it so important to have a culture that supports knowledge transfer on a daily basis.
This company is a startup and like all startups, fast delivery is mandatory in order to survive. Because of this constraint, the company had a rule that team members could not take holidays at the same time. They would need to organise their vacations in order to have 2/3 of the team working. Until last summer, each person within the team was responsible for different tasks, there weren’t two persons responsible for a common task.
Summer came and during 4 sprints there was always someone on vacations. What happened was something predictable, the team did not deliver almost anything during those 4 sprints (2 months) because there was always someone missing with needed knowledge to deliver parts of the stories. This missing knowledge within the team was almost critical to the company.
Until last summer, this team never cared with knowledge transfer. Now, my friend told me that nowadays the company invests a lot of time in order to not suffer from the same problem again. I am pretty sure many other companies will not be so lucky if something like this happens to them. More and more it is crucial for companies to create a culture that promotes knowledge transfer within their organisation.
If you were/are in the same situation as my friend and you are looking for ways to transfer knowledge you can get a lot of ideas here.
I would love to get a star rating for this post:
Hi Luis,
The term Knowledge Transfer in this part of the world is more “forced” by senior management - a better term used here is Knowledge Sharing, which is more of a voluntary nature. Breakdown of systems due to the non availability of team members for critical tasks - wouldn’t that be case of not following “collective code ownership” ? I may sound a bit theoritical, but I feel critical tasks should definitely have a back up member/s to take up the task in the primary member’s absence.
Thank you Luis and Srinath for this discussion online. I agree that “knowledge transfer” is usually associated with senior management “forcing” it, whereas “knowledge sharing” is about what the team does organically for their own good without an authority figure motivating it.
Hi,
I agree :) You are right :)
Luis