Survey of Knowledge Management tools and concepts that help facilitate the transfer of small projects between teams

1. Survey of Knowledge Management tools and conceptsthat help facilitate the transfer of small projects between teams By David Wiggins In submission for the USC CSCI 577b Individual Presentation

2. Strategies of Knowledge Management • Push Strategy – Actively Managing Knowledge • Individuals strive to explicitly encode their knowledge into a shared knowledge repository. • Pull Strategy – ad hoc knowledge seeking • Individuals make knowledge requests of experts associated with a particular subject

3. Other knowledge management strategies and instruments for companies include: • rewards (as a means of motivating for knowledge sharing) • storytelling (as a means of transferring tacit knowledge) • cross-project learning • after action reviews • knowledge mapping (a map of knowledge repositories within a company accessible by all) • communities of practice • expert directories (to enable knowledge seeker to reach to the experts) • best practice transfer • knowledge fairs • competence management (systematic evaluation and planning of competences of individual organization members) • proximity & architecture (the physical situation of employees can be either conducive or obstructive to knowledge sharing) • master-apprentice relationship • collaborative technologies (groupware, etc.) • knowledge repositories (databases, bookmarking engines, etc.) • measuring and reporting intellectual capital (a way of making explicit knowledge for companies) • knowledge brokers (some organizational members take on responsibility for a specific "field" and act as first reference on whom to talk about a specific subject) • social software (wikis, social bookmarking, blogs, etc.) • Inter-project knowledge transfer Copied from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_management

4. How does CS577do it? • Team website  repository • MS Word templates  standardized format for docs • Graded Documentation Review  incentive to do it • Review Boards with project stake holders  public display of the documentation

5. Why have I been thinking of this? • Finished a Prototype project that would take possibly years before it would finally be approved for official development - 5 months ago. • Took cs577a where I was on a project that put major effort into documenting our work and then was discontinued for cs577b because all my team mates got internships for the summer. • Started cs577b on a different project I didn’t know anything about as the project manager with a team of 7 people and most of them were just as much in the dark as I am.

6. Survey says • I think the key to transferring a project from one team to another is documentation. Requirements, design decisions and rationale, design documents, meeting notes, commented code, etc. As much as process is a pain, that’s one of the reasons we have it. - Kalin Wilson - Senior SW Engineer at Scitor

7. A mental model clash! • Don’t document. • Don’t share. • Don’t teach others your domain knowledge. • Become a domain expert. • Be indispensable. • It’s job security. • Look out for yourself.

8. Manage your culture • Good Knowledge management starts in your team/company/workplace culture. • Make sure all stockholders in the project: • Understand the value of knowledge management • Accept the strategy for managing the knowledge

9. Knowledge capture incentives Make content submission Mandatory? or Rewarded? Example of a reward based system: http://stackoverflow.com/ Medals, achievements, rewards,… Public Recognition

10. Things to document • Requirements • Design Decisions and Rationale • Design documents • Meeting notes • Commented code • Policies and Procedures • Mockups

11. Tools - Atlassian • www.atlassian.com • Confluence – Collaboration • Jira – Project Tracking • Dev Tools – Code Quality • … • Not Free • Technical support • Confluence: • File sharing • Online editor • Rich Content • Share features • Notifications • Content classification tags • Version Control • Publishing

12. Tools - Wiki • http://www.wikispaces.com/

13. Tools – Camtasia - CamStudio • http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.html - http://camstudio.org/ • Walk through recordings of your work. • Drawback: • Time investment • Memory usage • Requires a webcam/mic

14. References • http://stackoverflow.com/ • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_management • http://www.atlassian.com/ • http://www.bloomfire.com/ • http://www.wikispaces.com/ • http://sharepoint.microsoft.com • http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.html • http://camstudio.org/ • http://www.mindtouch.com/product/ • https://sites.google.com/