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How do you do knowledge transfer in tech teams?

2 points by dmundhra ↗ HN
Hi - I want to learn how you manage to do knowledge transfer in tech teams when people are leaving or new folks joining? Is it more of keeping things documented in Confluence or something, or are there any better processes or methods to do it?

5 comments

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tra3
Most knowledge transfers I’ve been a part of, have been “theatre”. Even when the effort is done in good faith it’s impossible to transfer more than the high level knowledge.

Unless there’s a consistent effort to document the system throughout the lifecycle of the project, you’re not going to be able to do it in the last 2 weeks.

readonthegoapp
training up myself over the past few months, it's a mix of reading KB articles, support cases, internal wiki confluence docs, tons of asking for help, asking questions to all sorts of fellow and senior techies, listening and learning and note-taking and further research from customer calls, a good amount of self-learning-by-doing (installing/modifying software, etc.), etc. -- much of it as not-so-technical stuff -- just, how does this business work? how do we do things? what products/processes are changing day to day?

i've been working on a KB-with-built-in-knowledge-certification feature that would, in theory, help address this (it's in perpetual pre-MVP).

use cases might be new Sales / Support Engineers, or Account / Success Managers, who need to learn 300 or so pieces of information -- enough to at least get dangerous quickly -- but they need a way to prove -- to themselves at least -- that they know the material in the KB.

the information doesn't necessarily get stale 'fast', but it def does get stale.

diff folks can give you diff answers.

dmundhra
KB-with-built-in-knowledge-certification is interesting, but who builds the KB?
readonthegoapp
in my case, i'm manually building a kb that is basically a mirror/copy of an existing kb, along with a bunch of new articles for all the knowledge i've gained over time.

i don't see a good way to auto-create this kb initially, nor a good way to maintain it -- both seem problematic/labor-intensive/doomed-to-be-painful at least in the near/medium term.

in theory, let's say there's a company KB, say from Zendesk, and there are 200 articles in it. the company wants to try to onboard new support agents more quickly/efficiently. so they go in and create at least one quiz question/answer for each KB article -- the 'Quiz/Certification Question' is directly in/linked to that specific KB article UI -- it doesn't live somewhere else -- this is what i see as the core innovation.

i could imagine some type of AI being able to auto-generate these quiz questions/answers in the future, but for now a human would have to create them.

thmasr
By keeping an up to date knowledge base.

Works great for transferring knowledge to yourself 2 years down the line as well! Foolproof KB articles have saved my arse countless times.