And Now It’s Too Late

What started out as an idea for a single post is probably going to take several to cover the topic at hand.  The risk we’re talking about here is …

TRIBAL KNOWLEDGE

WHAT IS TRIBAL KNOWLEDGE?
I’ve been doing a little research via some professional chat forums, and the first question to come up was, “What’s your definition of Tribal Knowledge?”

Well, the way I’m using it here I mean the experience and skill that you rely on to run your organization an projects that is locked away in some long-term employee’s head and if documented at all (which is rare), the documentation is sketchy at best and probably can only be deciphered by the person holding the knowledge in the first place.  It exists in any organization that has been around for a while, and it’s probably a far bigger risk than you might consider it to be.  In fact, I believe the very nature of Tribal Knowledge makes it a ‘top 5’ that is hardly ever documented in your risk register.

The risk connection on this one should be pretty clear, but it also has many layers that are often disguised.  I’ll get to the results of some of my research in a future post on this topic (remember, I said this was going to be a multi-part thing).  What I want to cover in this post is something that hit me squarely in the jaw within the past week on one of my own projects.

MY STORY?
Our team is building a customer enterprise-level system for a client.  In doing our work, we recorded videos and have relied on many interactions with our client’s staff.  Many of said staff has been around a long time. One in particular has logged 20 years and he’s not even forty yet.  I’d definitely consider him a legacy guy and, with those two decades, he holds a massive amount of knowledge within his brain … most of it of the tribal variety that I described.

We’re replacing a system that has outlived its usefulness with something driven in a completely different way.  We’ve done our joint homework and the first version will focus on what we see as the core work streams in the process that identify discrete product need and present that to vendors in a new, directly interactive way.  Oh, and did I mention the product only stays at the client for a maximum of one day in the vast majority of the cases?

LEGACY EMPLOYEE RISK
Back to our legacy employee (I’ll call him Jack).  Much of Jack’s work revolves around the core system we are writing.  He also has unique relationships with some customers, allowing our client to move more products more quickly at key intervals.  Our videos and interviews with Jack clearly brought this out.  His work will be greatly enhanced by what we are doing and we will leverage his skills as we extend the new core system outward.  Or at least we would have done that.

You see, Jack and our client are parting company.  Have done so is more accurate by the time this gets to the blog.  And while we did gain a wealth of knowledge from him, he will take a massive amount of his tribal knowledge with him and it will be lost.  What will remain will be the gaps … the new risks that our client will need to fill in as they go through another business year.  And many of those gaps could have been eliminated years ago by clear process documentation that turned tribal knowledge into organizational assets.

But, as I wrote a while back in this article, my old friend Dr. Seuss ended his story of “Too Many Daves” with the words:

And Now It’s Too Late!

Bio:

Mark Moore has held multiple professional positions in IT and business for nearly three decades serving organizations both small and large, public and private.  With over half that time as a project manager, he has successfully managed major initiatives spanning multiple years with a cost of over $3 Million and teams of over 250 people.  He has been a Project Management Professional since 2002, served as President of the PMI Western Michigan Chapter, and presented at multiple NCPMI Annual Events.  Mark holds a Masters of Education degree from Colorado State University with a concentration in Adult Education and Training.  He is an experienced writer, speaker and presenter on project management and team building topics.  Mark is the Principal Consultant for Broken Arrow Associates, LTD.  He and his family live in a rural area outside of Raleigh, North Carolina.

To contact Mark for opportunities or questions, send an e-mail to info@baa-ltd.com.