Recently, we have witnessed a significant increase in knowledge retention projects for retiring experts.
When employees leave the company, they take with them a "treasure"—experience, knowledge, and skills accumulated over the years. This departure can cause significant damage to technological developments, processes, and all existing business activities. Therefore, there is a crucial need to preserve the knowledge of the retirees and transfer it to their successors.
Preserving the knowledge of retiring experts creates excellent value for the unit:
Significant knowledge for core processes is not lost and becomes an organizational asset
Ability to identify critical gaps between retiring position holders and their successors and prepare accordingly
Reducing the performance gap between the expert and their successors
Like most knowledge management projects, mapping activity is required here as a preliminary activity for knowledge documentation.
Retiring experts usually possess extensive knowledge, and attempting to document all their knowledge is doomed to failure from the start. Therefore, we should aim to maximally identify those areas of expertise that will bring maximum profit to the business unit (a kind of "Pareto principle" - 20% of knowledge that will help 80% of employees).
Identification should be done according to relevant business needs and target audiences.
So how do we do this?
Conduct several meetings/interviews with the expert and their successor, with their direct manager, and with any work colleague who can contribute, and try to get answers to 4 "big" questions, each of which includes a world of its own:
What?
Why?
For whom?
How?
What?
In the first stage, there is a need to identify the areas of expertise of the retiring expert and the types of knowledge they possess.
It is recommended to start by identifying the declarative knowledge and summarizing the significant area of expertise in one line.
Begin to "break down" the major area of expertise: What is the procedural knowledge of the retiree? What makes up their area of expertise? What sub-specialties? Always strive to combine explicit and tacit knowledge.
Why?
After collecting the areas of occupation and expertise, the distillation stage begins: reducing the list to areas that will bring the highest business value.
The main parameter to consider is the cost of not preserving the knowledge. How important is the knowledge? How connected is it to business processes? To what extent is it obtainable from other employees in the unit? Is it sufficiently documented?
For whom?
Define the target audience for the knowledge to be documented: Which employees will use it directly and regularly?
Who will use it partially? Who will benefit from direct or indirect use of the knowledge?
How?
Define the form and way the documented knowledge will be presented: checklist, process description, insights repository, Q&A, problems and solutions, expert lists, and more.
This question is sometimes difficult to answer perfectly at the mapping stage, but a direction can usually be formed according to the answers to the previous questions.
In conclusion, you can roll up your sleeves and start documenting when there are answers and agreement on the four mapping questions. Successful mapping will make the project more pleasant and more accessible.
Good luck!
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