Knowledge Transfer Toolkit

No one approach to knowledge transfer will be a complete solution; best practice organizations develop toolkits of approaches to address the issue of knowledge capture and transfer. The approaches best suited for capturing and /or transferring knowledge depend entirely upon the type of knowledge, the culture of the organization, and the relationship between the sender and receiver involved in the knowledge exchange.

Reward/recognition system that promotes and captures knowledge transfer.
Individuals who share and retain knowledge can better perform their jobs and consequently receive recognition as key contributors and experts. It may be necessary to create more structured reward and recognition systems to encourage employees to change their behavior. A standardized reward system may help institutionalize the practice into the common culture. Behavior that is rewarded is repeated. Best practice organizations see the need to align reward and recognition with sharing knowledge. Knowledge Bucks can be used as prizes for contributing good ideas, and spot bonuses for exemplary knowledge-sharing efforts.

Mentoring
Mentoring is widely recognized today as an extremely beneficial career development tool. Mentoring can minimize multigenerational conflict Studies have shown that mentored employees:

• Perform better on the job

• Advance more rapidly within the organization

• Express lower turnover intentions than their nonmentored counterparts.

• Report more job and career satisfaction

• Thirty-five percent of employees who do not receive regular mentoring plan to seek other employment within a year.

A good mentoring program can:

• Help new employees learn the culture and inner workings faster.

• Help newly promoted staff understand and fulfill their new responsibilities faster.

• Increase communication and strengthen employee bonds.

• Ensure that accumulated knowledge and experience is shared and passed on, reducing the impact when employees leave.

• Promote underrepresented employees

• Develop future leaders

• Project a strong and positive employer brand

Beginning any mentoring relationship will be a unique process based on the needs & skills of the people involved.

After Action Reviews/Lessons Learned
Created by the U.S. Army to improve team performance by reflecting on action. Involves reviewing the overall mission of a team and establishing the ground truth of the actual events by replaying the critical moments. By the exploring the causes of the actuals results, the team can focus on key issues and reflect on lessons learned and critical success factors. The review concludes with a review of the next project and an anticipation for future issues. The review works best when it begins at a project team level and percolates through the reporting structure. The entire team should be involved to gain multiple viewpoints. Whomever leads the review must understand that trends should be the focus and not individuals. After Action Reviews should be held after any identifiable event.

Communities of Practice/Networks
Groups of people who come together to share and to learn from one another face-to-face and virtually. They are held together by a common purpose; they contribute to a body of knowledge and are driven by a desire and need to share problems, experiences, insights, templates, tools, and best practices. Community members deepen their knowledge by interacting on an ongoing basis.

Pecha Kucha
Pecha Kucha (pronounced peh-cha ku-cha) was started in Tokyo, Japan in 2003. The idea behind Pecha Kucha is to keep presentations concise, the interest level up and to have many presenters sharing their ideas within the course of one night. Therefore the 20x20 Pecha Kucha format was created: each presenter is allowed a slideshow of 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds. This results in a total presentation time of 6 minutes 40 seconds on a stage before the next presenter is up.

The 20x20 format of Pecha Kucha is now also being adopted in the business world, with some company internal business presentations being run in a strict 6 minutes 40 seconds, with all discussion and questions held to the end of the presentation. This is primarily a device to help timebox presentations, force presenters to be more focused in their message, allow them to flow uninterrupted, and ultimately to avoid the "death by powerpoint" syndrome, of sitting through long and often tedious PowerPoint presentations.

Repositories
Repositories are primarily used to capture explicit information and typically contain databases that have structured content. It is common to use a customer relationship management system to hold this kind of information.

Subject Matter Experts Directories
Expertise locator systems can point to individuals both inside and outside the organization. This allows access to humans rather than information to enable an actual conversation or an e-mail exchange that sets the contest around information.

Process Improvement
Integrate knowledge replication and capture into the organization’s process improvement. Best practice organizations integrate knowledge sharing with people’s work by embedding knowledge sharing in routine work processes.

Host Visible Knowledge-Sharing Events
Make knowledge sharing a highly visible activity in which members of a network gather to exchange knowledge, insights, stories, and practices. Knowledge Fairs or Knowledge Weeks can be high-profile activities, with addresses by senior managers and outside speakers. This makes sharing knowledge a public, sought-after activity and shapes behavior by making participation in knowledge-sharing events desirable.

Interviews
Interviewing can be a very effective means of tacit knowledge capture. Types of interviews include: project completion/review, project milestone review, reactive exit interview, preemptive exit interview, after mission-critical or innovative work, and after special projects and/or pilot projects. Videotaping is an option it allows for a richer capture of the knowledge because one can capture more of the interaction between the interviewer and interviewee.

Knowledge maps
Guide to, or inventory of, an organization's internal or external repositories or sources of information or knowledge. These sources may include documents, files, databases, recordings of best practices or activities, or webpages.

Knowledge audits
The knowledge audit (K-Audit) is a systematic and scientific examination and evaluation of the explicit and tacit knowledge resources in the company. The K-Audit investigates and analyses the current knowledge-environment and culminates, in a diagnostic and prognostic report on the current corporate ‘knowledge health’. The report provides evidence as to whether corporate knowledge value potential is being maximized. In this respect the K-Audit measures the risk and opportunities faced by the organization with respect to corporate knowledge.”

Storytelling
Researchers have proposed that individuals learn the best from stories. Narratives, or storytelling, are a rich medium for transferring tacit and implicit knowledge. When experts share stories they help to prepare listeners to deal with similar situations that may occur in the future and they communicate tacit knowledge regarding their perceptions, feelings, interpretations values, strategies, etc. in rich and meaningful ways.

Web 2.0 technologies
Web 2.0 technology is a user-centered form of information management and retrieval using collaborative creation and tagging of digital knowledge repositories. Web 2.0 technology has the potential to advance online learning, knowledge sharing and knowledge transfer beyond traditional methods of knowledge delivery.

Examples include: wikis, blogs, social-networking, open-source, open-content, file-sharing, and peer-production.