how it all started
There were also informal jokes, which even now are fun to revisit.
Managers had slightly different initiatives. On the basis of blogs, they did three cool things: book reviews, a reality show of the project, and training courses for onboarding.
About reality shows. We were approached by a publishing center to make an online store for them with an online reader service. And in blogs, we described in real time how the work on the project was going on behalf of all its key employees. It was necessary to describe everything in as much detail as possible in order to find out, using the example of this project, what works well in our processes and what does not work very well.
Based on our blogs there were training courses, divided into grades. For several of them, one of the founders of QSOFT recorded training videos
And the manual described business processes. This made it easier to communicate your thoughts to subordinates and less redo the work later. This was especially important for account managers because the client can leave and mistakes are costly.
The very idea of capturing the tacit knowledge of management and employees and sharing it openly was progressive. From this implicit knowledge, 10 years later, the QSOFT Academy and our own employee knowledge development platform grew.
I don’t think that now someone is actively blogging on the corporate portal, because the functionality itself is morally outdated. Now there are more convenient platforms for knowledge management, which are different from blogs, like a brand new iPhone from push-button Siemens.
But the ideas themselves for knowledge sharing formats can still be implemented: reality shows from the project, own courses for employees, informal life hacks and jokes.
From this managerial experiment, I would highlight a few insights.
Positive sides:
implicit knowledge that is not and will not be in formal documents is better to be recorded in blogs than not stored at all;
colleagues give feedback in the comments. It helps to grow professionally;
connection to the intranet. Hence confidentiality, preservation of expertise: the articles already describe how this or that component works, so if a person decides to quit, then an article in the KB is better than nothing;
you can go down in history: you leave the company, and newcomers will read your articles.
Negative sides:
the blog is sporadic. Still, this is almost charity, and systemic knowledge management cannot be built on a completely voluntary basis;
unstructured information: to find the right article, you had to scroll through all the blogs on the portal;
distracted by jokes and personal notes. While laughing, I forgot about the tickets that need to be done 🙂
Later, based on the experience with blogs, we began to consciously build knowledge management at home. How this happened, I will tell in the following articles.
