How to get that brain dump from hard-to-replace IT staff

by Sean McGrath

January 4, 2008 —

The accumulation of highly valuable expertise between the ears of specific
individuals is a fact of life. A highly related fact of life is that individuals
don't stay in one job forever. Even if they did (they don't -- the grim reaper
gets us all eventually) they have limited bandwidth and they forget stuff as
time goes by.

Finding ways to capture vital knowledge before it heads out the door or is
forgotten forever is a major problem these days and becoming more of a problem
with every digital decade that passes. There are no silver bullets to this problem
but there are some lightweight but highly effective techniques that can be used
today. Here are some quick suggestions on getting and documenting your knowledge assets. You can also find my experiences with some of these tips here.

The first thing to do is avoid at all costs simply asking the expert to
write down what she knows. This very rarely works. Even if the expert has
the time (which, by definition, she doesn't) she probably would suffer writer's
block from the get go. An expert is someone who cannot tell you what it is they
know. Their knowledge is so deep, so multi-dimensional, so multi-faceted that
the question "where to start?" can be paralyzing.

A better starting place is to hook a young, enthusiastic employee up with
the expert. Get the young employee to follow the expert around and start
structuring and capturing the knowledge as it pours forth. From the first draft
onwards, a very interesting thing happens. The expert will have no difficulty
finding time to point out all the areas where the young gun has got it wrong.
It is much easier for an expert to correct an exposition that is incorrect,
than to create the exposition in the first place.

Obviously, this approach is highly dependent on the human relationship between
the expert and her knowledge-capturing co-worker. Experts can be touchy and
each one is a snowflake requiring different handling.

A good way to get over the "where to start?" problem is to turn
the engagement into a biographical interview. i.e. start with a chronological
account of the work the expert has been involved with since joining the enterprise.
This will provide plenty of fodder for further interviews and provides a crude
but useful gap analysis. i.e. "what work were you involved in during the
eight month gap between project X and project Y?"

These days audio and video capture devices are so commonplace that there is
no need for the interviewer to feverishly try to capture notes of the interview
conversations. Video the interviews and write the notes from the video. Besides,
the videos provide useful reference material going forward. (You can check out my experiences using video here.)

Another useful trick is to leverage web technologies to avoid "big
document syndrome". Rather than work within the limiting confines of
a linear treatise, why not use a collaborative WIKI. This can have the useful
dynamic of allowing others to chime in their knowledge as the magnum opus of
knowledge progresses.

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