"Knowledge management” might sound like a vague term, but it represents a lot of important work that makes a real impact.
While it might be easy for good knowledge management to go unnoticed, when a team lacks effective knowledge management practices, it becomes obvious in the form of countless miscommunications and inefficiencies.
In this guide, we’ll go over what knowledge management means and why it matters, plus how to implement knowledge management practices that will change the game for your team’s communication and productivity.
Table of Contents
What Is Knowledge Management?
Knowledge management is the methodology for consolidating information held by each member of a team or each team in an organization, then making that information accessible across the whole team or organization.
Why Is Knowledge Management Important?
Knowledge management is a critical play for any organization because it keeps your team running effectively as a unit and helps you meet your goals faster.
With the help of a solid knowledge management framework, here’s what you can achieve:
Avoid Working in Silos
When teams or team members within an organization don’t share valuable information with each other, it leads to difficulties in achieving long-term goals. The effect of a lack of knowledge sharing is called silo mentality.
Silo mentality can affect any type of team and leads to inefficiencies and redundancies between departments, miscommunications over responsibilities and ownership, a lack of accountability, and a general lack of trust within the organization’s culture.
Effective knowledge-sharing strategies that encourage collaboration and make it a part of daily life can prevent silos from forming and break them down between departments that are already struggling.
Prevent Loss of Knowledge
As much as we don’t want to admit it, our teams won’t look the same forever. People will leave the team or the organization -- sometimes key contributors who hold a wealth of unspoken, or implicit, institutional knowledge gained through experience.
Other team members often feel like they don’t need to learn or know everything about a key contributor’s processes and best practices since they do it so effectively on their own. The problem with this is that when your experts exit, you might be stuck with a serious information gap that affects your team’s ability to complete their work.
In a team that embraces a culture of knowledge sharing, this is much less of an issue because one person isn’t holding knowledge that is inaccessible to others.
Work and Make Decisions More Efficiently
Teams with poor knowledge management practices spend a lot of their time searching for information – valuable time that they may not be able to afford to spend.
60% of employees need to search within four or more sources to find information every day, and naturally, this leads to time that could have been spent getting things done devoted to work that could be avoided.
When you prioritize knowledge management as a team and as an organization, you’ll get things done faster and be able to take on more advanced projects.
Implementing Winning Knowledge Management Strategies
So, you need to start crafting a knowledge management strategy to avoid silos, loss of knowledge, and wasted time. But where do you begin? What exactly does “knowledge management” entail?
Often, knowledge management requires some form of internal documentation. This is an intimidating idea for teams who might have negative experiences with documentation that takes too much time to create, quickly becomes outdated, and takes away their time from more important tasks.
However, there are strategies your team can implement to create documentation that is comprehensive, accessible, and – most importantly – a living document created incrementally.
Know What to Document
One key knowledge management strategy your team should master is finding the balance between gathering necessary information while ensuring the knowledge management plan is not too ambitious for your team’s workload and work style.
It’s okay to be selective, and to respect your teammates’ time, you should be. Ultimately, there are three types of documentation that teams, especially technical teams, need in some form: documentation of ongoing conversations, your decision-making process, and (when applicable) technical information.
Learn more about these types of documentation – both what they entail and how and when to document them.
Build Documentation Your Team Will Actually Use
Along with crafting a knowledge management strategy that is realistic for your team to accomplish, it is also important that your strategy makes the information accessible for the whole team. This includes making it easy to understand, easy to locate and navigate, and easy to maintain and update.
Our ebook on building documentation your team will actually want to use dives deep into how to act on these best practices -- it's specific to software teams, but includes valuable tips for any team.
Knowledge Management Strategies By Team
Different types of teams have different needs depending on the work they accomplish. While every team, no matter the function, requires some form of knowledge management, it’s especially important for technical teams as these roles require working with lots of information every day.
IT Teams
Effective knowledge management is necessary for IT service management teams because it streamlines onboarding and ensures that every customer will receive the same level of service, no matter who is providing it.
Keep reading to learn more about ITSM documentation and get 3 actionable tips for establishing effective ITSM process documentation.
Software Development Teams
Knowledge management is also important for software development teams because it reduces wasted time from searching multiple sources for information every day and unnecessary meetings.
Additionally, knowledge management strategies can reduce misunderstandings and improve stakeholder communication. It also prevents the loss of valuable product knowledge when key team members exit the organization.
Knowledge management strategies may look different throughout the software development life cycle, from the requirements phase and beyond.
Learn more about the essential elements of documentation for software teams:
Selecting the Right Knowledge Management Tools
As you implement knowledge management strategies, you’ll need to make sure that your team is equipped with the right tools.
Since knowledge management is a form of collaboration, the tools that help you along the way can often be referred to as groupware, any type of software that helps a group of people work together or share information.
Documentation Tools
Knowledge management often takes the form of documentation, so having a documentation tool is one of the most important decisions you will make as you implement knowledge management practices across your team and organization.
Here are some comparisons of popular knowledge management tools that you can use to make your decision about how to consolidate information.
Already all-in on Confluence as your documentation tool of choice? Here are the top 5 apps you need for your Confluence knowledge base.
Ready to Start Your Knowledge Management Journey?
We’re here to help! Explore our blog for more helpful guides to documentation and collaboration, or try Gliffy free to visualize key structures and process directly in Confluence, making your documentation more engaging and easier to understand at a glance.