Exploratory Development

Knowledge management is quite a controversial topic. Some companies invested big resources into knowledge management projects and didn’t get expected results. Due to these failures knowledge management is considered by some companies as just yet another “silver bullet” which doesn’t provide any real value. Some companies believe that by managing knowledge they can solve all their problems.

It seems that the truth is somewhere between. Knowledge management is not a silver bullet, but it can improve company’s bottom line by making its operations more effective. Mostly it is targeted long-term goals – optimization of company’s work (but mainly in the future), development of staff. It provides better information for making decisions because knowledge sharing increases transparency. Calculating numerical outcomes of knowledge management projects is not an easy task, but often it is much easier to calculate losses if such project is not implemented.

Companies tend to start global revolutionary projects in this sphere, despite of the fact that large projects are seldom successful. It’s a smart move to take into account statistics and split project into smaller parts:

• Having several smaller parts provides a company possibility to change strategy after implementation of each part – a company can use results of previous stages in implementation of the rest, it can change, cancel or add new phase;
• Big changes almost always meet resistance from people – when people are tired of changes they will ignore or even sabotage new projects. Splitting a big project into smaller ones can allow to separate phases in time and to give people time to get used;
• A company gets results quicker – after every part.

Another common misconception is that new technologies (e.g. ontology, knowledge base, etc) automatically improve knowledge sharing. Without appropriate corporate culture people will not use technologies. Yet technologies can help to share knowledge by making it easier.

Let’s take a look at some practical ways to share knowledge in a software development company. These methods don’t require serious investments or new systems, while providing value to a company:

• Processes
• Common practices
• Internal conferences/camps
• Trainings
• Common retrospectives
• Team review
• “Scrum of Scrums”
• Success stories
• Common place

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Talent management is a new buzzword (actually, not even really new). This term is used to describe very wide range of activities – from gathering people with appropriate skills as a project team to designing complex corporate retaining programs. Nowadays terms talent management, human resources management and human capital management are used interchangeably.

Let’s take a look at talent management from perspectives of an employee and an employer. It seems that their goals of talent management are different.

What does a person expect from talent management? S/he needs to improve her/his skills, increase salary, get higher position, increase self-esteem and job satisfaction, etc. What does a company expect from talent management? It needs to be able to fulfill its operations in the most effective way – right people in the right place for the minimal amount of resources (resources include wide range of things – money, time, reputation, attention, etc). So, it seems logical to hire minimally qualified people who can perform a job and pay them as little as possible. Yes, requirements of a person are completely different from company’s needs.

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