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Robust Knowledge Management Approach for

Continued Success

Leadership Challenges

Abstract ID : PMIBC-17-3-010

Authors : Srividya Natasa Misra & Boopathy Jayaraman

a

Project Management Practitioners’ Conference 2017

www.pmibanga lorechapter .o rg

CONTENTS

Abstract ........................................................................................................................................................................ 3

Introduction .................................................................................................................................................................. 3

Details of the paper...................................................................................................................................................... 4

Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................................. 13

References ................................................................................................................................................................ 13



ABSTRACT

Leaders face various challenges both internal & external to the organizations which require them to arrive at

winning strategies to accomplish goals in line with their vision and the values of the organization.

One of the most important challenges the leaders face is managing and retaining knowledge in the organizations.

Due to high demand for cutting-edge technology skills in the competitive market, most of the organizations

experience disruption in business continuity if highly skilled associates possessing a wealth of knowledge quit.

We propose a 5 pronged approach. One is to keep the highly skilled associates who are core and critical to the

organizations knowledge base and business, engaged and motivated by recognizing their accomplishments and

providing better opportunities & incentives. The second one is developing the capabilities of less skilled associates

through cross skilling using experiential learning method and AGILE methodologies (Pair Programming, Behavior

Driven Development). The third one is to have a robust Knowledge Management System using SECI framework

(Socialization, Externalization, Combination, Internalization) which is live and continuously updated. The fourth one

is the automation of mundane tasks to engage employees with exciting & more value added tasks. The fifth one is

to protect the corporate knowledge (intellectual property).

Together, with these 5 approaches any leader can effectively address this perpetual challenge of Competency

development, Knowledge Management and Key Associates retention.

Keywords – Knowledge Management, Associate Engagement, Competency development, SECI, cross skilling,

experiential learning

INTRODUCTION

With the advent of automation and latest technologies and their demand in market, leadership in any industry face

an enormous challenge in retaining the best talents. One of the biggest challenge in knowledge attrition is not

having a robust knowledge management system. While automation is generally seen as a threat which might take

away the jobs, there are also opportunities that it brings with it.

To help retain the best talents and their vast wealth of knowledge, we propose a five pronged approach of

knowledge management which has been used widely and quite successfully across the industry.

This article vividly describes the approach, the tools and methodology which will help in coming up with a robust

knowledge management system specific to IT industry.



DETAILS OF THE PAPER

The five-pronged approach for Robust Knowledge Management for Continued Success is

Figure 1: Five-pronged Approach for Robust Knowledge Management

5 Pronged Approach of Competency Management

A. Motivate & Retain highly

skilled associates

B. Develop Capabilities of less skilled associates

C. Robust Knowledge

Management System

D. Automation

E. Safeguard Corporate

Knowledge & Intellectual

Property



A. Motivate & Retain the highly skilled associates

In today’s economy with the technology advancement and cut throat competition, where people connect

instantly and access information from various sources, organizations have realized that highly skilled

associates are one of the valuable assets for business success. Retaining them has become all the more

important & challenging due to high costs of recruitment and selection, not to mention the productivity loss

due to the learning curve of new or existing associates to scale up. Apart from monetary benefits,

associates want to feel valued, appreciated at workplace and proud of their contribution to the

organization’s growth.

Here are a few ways to keep the highly skilled associates motivated and engaged:

Raise expectations at workplace by engaging the associates with highly challenging tasks even

for daily operational activities. Give the associates the purpose of doing things by explaining “the

big picture” of how their work contribute to the business goals & success. Associates should feel

that they are continuously learning at work.

Empower the associates by letting them lead & take part in the decision making as possible.

Engage the potential associates seen as emerging leaders in reverse mentoring program to

mentor the senior executives to exchange ideas & challenge each other.

Frequent communication with the associates on the personal aspiration & career development

goals, work together to define the development plan and ensure the effectiveness of

implementation. Listen to the associates needs and translate them to fit to the organization goals.

Engage & mentor them in organization initiatives on latest technologies i.e. hackthon

competitions, seminars.

Guide them in realizing their passion to work in the implementation of ideas/innovation and

make them integral part of department/organization experts working groups

Bring positive reinforcement at workplace with Reward & Recognition program by giving

individuals a surprise bonus for their exceptional work. Create a culture of celebrating the success

of each & every milestone (small & big). Encourage the key members to take part in team building

activities and other organizational activities of their interest - cultural programs, mentoring / training

the junior associates, involve in Corporate Social Responsibility activities.

Encourage the associates to pursue their dreams/hobbies apart from the work-related activities

by accommodating them to participate in sports and cultural programs of their interest. Allow the

associates to take vacation time so that they can pursue their personal interests.

Engage the family members of the associates at workplace with programs like “Bring Family to

Office” or “Bring Child to Office”. Associates and their family members feel happy and delighted if

the family members get surprise gift as a token of appreciation. Some organizations already do

this effectively.



Evaluate & measure the associate engagement & motivation with periodic associate

satisfaction survey (at least once a year or even once in 2 years is still effective).The above means

of motivating associate would also result in the improved productivity and cost turnover. The

measures of these key performance indicators would gauge the effectiveness & success of

associate satisfaction.

B. Develop the capabilities of less skilled associates

Competency Management system supports the development of professional and methodological

capabilities of associates focusing on strategic and target-group oriented standard competencies. To

achieve business goals, here are the following steps to develop the capabilities of less skilled associates:

Figure 2: Steps to develop the capabilities of less skilled associates

• Identify current skills required vs the business needs

•Evaluate the current skills level

•Set the target skills level at least for next 1 year

Skills Gap Analysis

•Pair Programming

•Experiential Learning/On-job training/Hands-on

•Demos/Presentation on the learnings

•Gemba walk

•Classroom sessions

•External trainings

•Mentoring & coaching

•Continous feedback

•Conduct fun learning activitiesi.e. bug mining,monthly quizzes

Methods

• Identify the key performance indicators and evaluate periodically

•Feedback obtained from the associates & mentors on the methods

•Quality of deliverables

Evaluation



C. Robust Knowledge Management system 1) Defining Data, Information & Knowledge

Data is the facts or observations, which are unorganized and

unprocessed and therefore has very less meaning unless processed.

Information is organized and processed data and therefore are

meaningful, valuable, useful and relevant.

Knowledge is contextualized information gained with experience,

knowhow, understanding and insight.

Figure 3: Data to Information to Knowledge

2) Different types of Knowledge

Tacit knowledge can be defined as “skills, ideas and experiences that people have in their minds and are,

therefore, difficult to access because it is often not codified and may not necessarily be easily

expressed”(Chugh, 2015).In the field of knowledge management, the concept of tacit knowledge refers to a

knowledge which cannot be fully codified.

Explicit knowledge is knowledge that can be readily articulated, codified, accessed and verbalized. It can be

easily transmitted to others. Most forms of explicit knowledge can be stored in certain media. The most

common forms of explicit knowledge are manuals, documents, procedures etc.

3) The Need of Robust Knowledge Management System & SECI Framework

As per Gartner IT Glossary “Knowledge management (KM) is a business process that formalizes the

management and use of an enterprise’s intellectual assets. KM promotes a collaborative and integrative approach

to the creation, capture, organization, access and use of information assets, including the tacit, uncaptured

knowledge of people”

Knowledge Management is closely coupled to organization goals & strategy and enable in creating value to the

organization. KM therefore should create the right tools, store the knowledge and make it available for the right

people at the right time to augment the learning process.

Knoco Ltd conducted Global Knowledge Management Survey 2014 with various knowledge consultants &

practitioners by asking them to prioritize the key elements of their KM implementation from a list of 11 potential KM

approaches.

Knowledge

Information

Data



The survey results show these as the core components of KM:

Connecting people

Learning from experience

Improve access to documents

Retention of knowledge

Creation of best practices

Innovation

These KM core components required to be translated to business terms to solve the major business issue on how

to bring knowledge from different sources, Information Management, Recordkeeping, maintain capabilities over

time, speeding up the learning curve, standardization, business decision making and continuous improvement

In order to address these issues, there are various knowledge frameworks available in the industry which are

interdependent. This paper focuses on one of the frameworks “SECI” – (Socialization, Externalization,

Combination and Internalization)

The SECI model of knowledge dimensions is a model of knowledge creation that explains how tacit and explicit

knowledge are transformed into organizational knowledge. The SECI model was originally developed by Ikujiro

Nonaka in 1990 and later further refined by Hirotaka Takeuchi.

These four modes of conversion of knowledge support both the push & pull (knowledge supply and demand).In

ideal situation, push & pull should run synchronously to avoid the knowledge oversupply/shortage leading to

destruction of knowledge value. The balance between the push & pull should be reviewed periodically.

Figure 4 : SECI Framework



4) Real Time examples of SECI framework Model :

D. Automation

Due to changing business situation the traditional organizations are struggling to maintain the tightly coupled

legacy software which required them to coordinate development and deployment efforts across hundreds to

thousands of engineers, making frequent deliveries impossible. The deliveries they do to provide to customers

require lots of manual effort. As a result the largest traditional organizations are finding it challenging to compete &

deliver the software innovation that their business require. Besides, these organizations see high attrition rate due

to low motivation factor among associates working on mundane & repetitive tasks for a long period.

As per Garner reports, around 80% of the activities in IT Operations are procedural and repetitive and there is an

opportunity that to magnify the efficiency, applying Devops (Continuous Delivery) & Agile principles would reduce

the development cost and increase the no. of products/services delivered to the end-users. The gained capacity

would be utilized to focus on new business strategy topics, innovation and re-skilling the associates with

new technologies i.e. Digital, Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, Cloud, IoT etc

To focus on the clear business objective of most of the organization to utilize freed-up capacity for innovation is to

improve the productivity of operational activities. Therefore, value stream mapping tool is used to understand the

cost and cycle time drivers to identify waste in the development processes.

Based on various reports and data, it has been observed that build, integration and testing processes are driving

factors both for cost and cycle time. Many large organizations have deployed Devops practices (Continuous

Delivery & Deployment) in accordance with Agile methodologies resulting in the reduction of cost and cycle time.



Continuous delivery is a DevOps software development practice where code changes are automatically built,

tested, and prepared for a release to production. It allows developers to automate function & non-functional testing

activities apart from unit tests to verify application updates before deploying to production. This helps developers

more thoroughly validate updates and discover issues early.

Every revision of source code that is committed triggers an automated workflow that builds, tests, and then stages

the update.

In continuous deployment, revisions are deployed to a production environment automatically without explicit

approval from a developer, making the entire software release process automated.

1) Scope for automation in the development life cycle



2) Major benefits from Automation & Continuous delivery approach:

Higher quality as focus is more on higher level testing activities such as exploratory testing, usability

testing, and performance and security testing apart from unit testing.

Low risk releases by applying patterns such as blue-green deployments (technique that reduces

downtime and risk by running two identical production environments called Blue and Green. At any time,

only one of the environments is live). If something unexpected happens in the live production environment

(let’s say Green), can immediate roll back to the last version by switching to Blue environment can be

done.

Faster time to market due to automate builds & testing activities results in the reduction of rework effort

and deliver to customer on faster pace.

Lower fixed costs associated with release process by build, test, deployment and environment

automation.

Continuous feedback from end users throughout the delivery lifecycle based on working software.

Alpha/Beta testing enable the development team to take a hypothesis-driven approach to product

development to test ideas with users before developing the complete features.

High motivation in the team as the team can engage more actively & regularly with users by

understanding their requirements, and see immediate outcome of the work. Moreover, the associates

would also engage on implementing new ideas/innovations.

E. Safeguard of Corporate Knowledge (Intellectual Property)

The four important pillars of the business are working capital, Fixed Assets, Intangible Assets and Intellectual

Property. Intellectual property is the result of creativity that includes industrial designs, copyrights, trademarks and

patents. For product based organizations operating in dynamic environment there is a need to actively protect their

interest by securing patents on innovating technologies.

The organization defines information security policy to ensure appropriate measures are put in place to protect

corporate information and the Information Technology Services (ITS) systems, and associated infrastructure.

The policy determines how the ITS services and infrastructure should be used in accordance with ITS industry

standards and to comply with strict audit requirements e.g. ISO/IEC 27001:2006.The objective of this policy is to

secure the business assets against theft, fraud, malicious or accidental damage, breach of privacy or

confidentiality.

To ensure the protection of the corporate knowledge, the organizations design and detail out the processes for

Design protection, Development Agreements, Invention Reports, License Agreements, Non-Disclosure

https://continuousdelivery.com/implementing/patterns/



Agreements, Open Source Software, Patents and Utility Models, Patent Infringements, Patent-Portfolio

Management, Patent Monetization, Patent Searches, Patent Watch, Trademarks & Trademark Piracy.

1) Major four types of intellectual property rights are :

A patent grants property rights on an invention, allowing the patent holder to exclude others from making,

selling, or using the invention. Since patent rights are exclusive, anyone making, using or selling the

patented invention without the patent owner’s authorization is guilty of infringement.

Copyright is a legal right that grants the creator (an individual or the business) of an original work

exclusive rights for its use and distribution. In contrast to patents, copyright protects only the original

expression of ideas, and not the underlying ideas and also lasts for a longer period than patents.

A trademark is a word, phrase, symbol, or design, product name & packaging or domain names that

distinguishes the source of products or services of one business from its competitors. In order to qualify for

patent protection, the mark must be distinctive. Trademark search before registering for a trademark would

ensure that a similar trademark doesn’t already exist.

A trade secret is a formula, process, device, or other business information that companies keep private to

give them a business advantage over their competitors. Examples of trade secrets in software include:

• Survey results

• Computer algorithms

• Source code, Designs, Formulas

To ensure the trade secret protection, an appropriate protection program is developed to include steps

such as

• Non-disclosure agreements as joining formalities

• Restricted access to source code & client data

• Password protections

• Limiting the number of people with access to sensitive information & areas (restricted Offshore

Development centres) by restricting the people of carrying pen drives and smart phones

• Post-employment restrictive covenants

• Installation of anti-virus software

• Security practices such as restricted access to internet, download of file, connecting devices(Pen

drive/USB)to laptops/machines

This prevent others from taking or using the source code, development processes, and algorithms without

permission.



In case for any breach or infringement of the intellectual property rights, it should be reported to the Information

Security Officer immediately for investigation.

Disaster Recovery Plans, Business Continuity Plans, backup strategies and fail over plans for the core IT services

and infrastructure ensure that any outages or disasters can be recovered from in the shortest possible time with a

minimal amount of data loss.

Frequent awareness program to the associates on the Information Security policies and procedures, protection of

intellectual property rights should be imparted to ensure that the associates are vigilant on the policies. Besides,

periodic audits and assessments would ensure that the security of data and resources are monitored and tracked

and corrective and preventive measures are taken appropriately.

CONCLUSION

Retention of best talent and the vast wealth of knowledge is a challenge. However with the right approach and a

robust knowledge management approach, we can ensure that the knowledge is retained within the organization.

Though a robust knowledge management approach doesn’t fill the gap for a talent loss, however it goes a long

way in ensuring that incoming and existing talent have access to the right information and thereby reducing the

impact of attrition and also to reduce attrition.

REFERENCES

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SECI_model_of_knowledge_dimensions

2. The Knowledge Manager's Handbook by John M. Nickles and Patrick Lambe

3. Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble (Author), David Farley (Author), Martin Fowler (Foreword)

4. Leading the transformation applying agile and devops principles at scale by by Gene Kim and Gary Gruver

5. Various sources from internet on Intellectual Property Rights

6. http://www.knowledge-management-tools.net/knowledge-management-systems.html

7. https://continuousdelivery.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SECI_model_of_knowledge_dimensions

http://www.knowledge-management-tools.net/knowledge-management-systems.html

https://continuousdelivery.com/

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