We assume that you’re a proactive person who wants to make a difference in your company, and the people around you don’t understand what you’re promoting, what knowledge management is, and what it can be useful for.

This document will tell you how and where to start as a Knowledge Manager (even without calling yourself that), and in four steps, we will gather a picture of the world, make early successes, and formulate a strategy for how to proceed.

Step 1: Gather a picture of the world

Start looking at a company in terms of sharing knowledge: what’s going on, what could be going on. Take notes. We’ve prepared some templates that are useful to fill in as we work.

The world picture is simple. You need to constantly track and drive.*Don’t focus on putting together a comprehensive map of 5-7 problem points and you can already pick a point for the next step. *Step 2: Finding Quick Win). At the same time, don’t jump to conclusions: you can’t get any further than Quick Wins unless you get a whole picture of the world.

Internal Communications (Map of Communications)

Mapping communications is a separate practice, and there are different ways to map communications, different ways to map them, and in a very small approximation, you can do this as follows:

Who communicates With whom Through what platform or context does this communication take place? On what questions How often does it occur?

Small companies can get a picture close to “everyone is talking to everyone”, this is normal, do not look for a catch.

Typical problematic issues

In the process of solving problems, employees inevitably have questions that they somehow find answers to, and one wants to identify questions that take too much time and effort away from the employees.

Question Who has the problem In what context did the question arise Where are people trying to find the answer? Where is the answer really?

At a glance, you can name three sources on the basis of which you can expand your horizons: correspondence of people in messengers, search engine logs and expert surveys.

  • So, people’s messaging — many of the problems are discussed in messengers, and watching the channels where that communication happens gives you a good idea of what’s going on, and it’s particularly interesting when someone is going on vacation or getting sick.

  • Search engine logs — if you can access those logs, you can often learn a lot just by looking at the entire search log, talking to users about what they’re looking for for, and so on.

  • And experts are asked — companies often have experts who come to them with questions, and they seem to be able to fill out a table immediately, but in practice, experts don’t remember what they’re asked, and you have to make arrangements with them that they’ll write down all the questions that come in so that they can then analyze the records.

Problems in processes

You may see the incomprehensible or the questionable in the business processes of a company, and changing those things is the hardest part, but that doesn’t mean you have to forget about it.

TODO: Is this just about CM processes? Probably not.

What’s the process, what exactly did you notice Which team Which isn’t how it could be better?

Different roles in companies have the typical pains of knowledge management. Try to figure out what is relevant to your company, to what extent and why.

Step 2: Finding Quick Win

TODO: How do you turn these problems into Quick Wins? Where do you get inspiration? If you don’t, let him come to our community, we can help (maybe).

To get started, you need to start building your reputation, and reputation and people are critical because you’re going to be working with change management.

It is useful to be aware of how you earn your reputation:

Who From Which Team What problems have you solved together How often do you communicate How do you evaluate a relationship?

However, remember that the way you look at things is different from the way other people look at them.

Quick Wins, small, accurate and cheap solutions to problems, can be used to find them by the observations made in the previous step (see also the following: WEB ) Step 1: Gather a picture of the world).

TODO: You need to make a table with Quick Wins

Look for problems that can be fixed.

  • Talking and talking to the right people

  • collecting a large number of disparate materials in a short instruction in the case

  • Write a new short instruction and place it in the right place.

  • smack down somewhere good

No coding, no implementation, no capital investment, you have to focus on specific, understandable pain that needs to improve dramatically, and the utility of that improvement should be able to show people.

Consider that people are likely to perceive many of your improvements as "oh, good idea!". That’s okay: you build authority in small steps.

Examples of such Quick Wins:

  • Connect people to demo sessions so they can start to get involved, like people in units who are isolated from information flows and lack knowledge.

  • Checklists when transferring responsibility from one person to another (for example, checklist of readiness for transfer to development, readiness for transfer from developers to tester, etc.)

  • A short instruction for a beginner in the project, containing everything you need to start work.

  • A brief guide for a support engineer with frequent problems, such as those that start bombing as soon as someone from the more experienced engineers goes on vacation or gets sick.

  • Introductory course on a Task tracker, wiki or some other common tool (HR often can not do it because they do not know what is important, and teams think that it is easier to tell)

Note: If you are a team leader, you can give the Quick Wins to your employees directly, for example, through quarterly goals.

Step 3: Move on

You want to build on the first successes, inspire people to do the same thing you do, but you can’t always do it quickly, because you have to pull a lot of big things over the years (especially Wikis and all that stuff), and it’s okay, keep trying, experimenting, doing good, and building credibility.

As your Quick Wins evolve, you will have more and more questions.

  • How to solve operational problems that arise in the process of work

  • How to deal with objections when trying to negotiate with others about collaboration and collaboration

  • How to capture and present results to inspire people to new feats and strengthen their authority

And at some point, you’ll be stuck in finances and the management will come up with the question "whose account is this banquet."

The work on these questions is outside the light track: Read chapters on KM practices, study other people’s cases, and use others' experiences to improve your Quick Wins.