April 15, 2019 at 16:23We build models, “sell” knowledge management to management and correct the survivor’s mistake
Recently, I talked about the reports that formed the conference program on knowledge management in IT companies KnowledgeConf. But not by single reports, nevertheless, the most important thing at the conference is the communication of experts, discussions, clash of opinions, at the junction of which something new, interesting and breakthrough arises. Therefore, in parallel in the program we will have four two-hour interactive formats - two round tables and two master classes.
Let's start with the most interactive formats. The first in the program will be a very awakening master class “Atlassian Team Playbook - learn new development practices for your team!” from Anna Zekunova and Irina Pozdnyakova from ToolsTrek, a company that implements Atlassian products, including the beloved Confluence.
Atlassian Team Playbook - a set of team health monitors, which is accompanied by games to develop various aspects of teamwork. Initially, it was the Atlassian internal framework, but having achieved good results within the company, they decided to share it with the IT world. At the master class, the participants will be divided into project teams, each team will receive a case prepared in advance, and each participant will receive a description of his role.
Participants will follow the team’s health monitor and play a game to improve work efficiency.
By the way, this practice can be fully adopted and tried inside your company; all Atlassian materials have been made publicly available .
The second interactive format - workshop “Model in any context”from the trainer for applied rationality, co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality " Poker " Prapion Medvedeva . Models are very common among IT professionals, we often model or think that we are modeling in working situations, but models are not at all reduced to drawing diagrams in UML notation.
The prapion will tell and demonstrate in practice how to apply the skills of building models with causal relationships and dependencies, even in situations and contexts where you usually do not do this, such as on agile planning, when thinking through the development process, separation of responsibilities system architecture.
On real cases faced by the participants of the meeting, Prapion will show how to transfer modeling and ontological skills from areas in which you already know this to all the rest.
Among the conference participants there are those who are taking the first steps in knowledge management, but there will also be those who have already achieved certain results. And the further we advance in this process, the more support is needed for management and clear metrics to assess the effectiveness of our work.
When you establish processes for knowledge management, you are a kind of KM evangelist, sooner or later you will have to look for like-minded people, both among your closest colleagues and among the management who can allocate resources and act as a “patron” of the initiative. Knowledge management cannot be built without one or the other. Accordingly, you, as a driver of the initiative, will in any case double-sell your idea: to linear colleagues and superiors.
Is it possible to convince colleagues and managers with the same arguments? Which methods are better suited for both cases, and which are different? How to overcome resistance and arguments of the form “it was normal”?
The discussion “How to sell knowledge management ideas to management and colleagues” from the head of the Kaspersky Lab training and certification group Rodion Nagornov sets the goal of discussing and getting a list or even a “script” for selling knowledge management ideas in your company with a list of possible objections, counterarguments to them, as well as a list of metrics that can substantiate the importance of knowledge management practices.
We will definitely share this “artifact” after the conference, but better come and help us create it together.
The productive day will be completed by our experimental format - the session of the collective dream “Technologies of the future for knowledge management” . The event will be devoted to how to fill the gap between what tasks in the field of knowledge management I would like to solve automatically, and what technologies and how exactly to use for this.
We will discuss problems in the field of knowledge management and fantasize about how modern technologies (AI, web, Data Mining, Natural Language Processing, computer vision, etc.) can solve such problems. Together we will be able to look at the problem from different angles and think about possible solutions.
We would like the participants to come to the session a little prepared, throwing a list of problems that exist in the knowledge management in IT companies (for example, the initial filling of the knowledge base, outdated content and checking its completeness, semantic search, user involvement, etc.) , or by studying what technologies, research and concepts are already in the field of ML, AI, NLP, for example, here , and what features and limitations they have.
The best result of such a session, and of our entire conference, will be a real Proof of Concept , if one of the engineers from startups takes and tries to put the ideas into practice. Following the results of the session, we will definitely create a manifest with ideas and implementation options, it can be taken and started to be implemented.
The session will be led by Igor Tsupko , Director for Unknown at Flant , and Maxim Leonovich , co-founder of OneBar startup , will be among the experts . Maxim’s company creates and develops a solution that can process conversations in the Slack corporate messenger and creates a knowledge base of questions and answers. Of course, our speakers and PC members will join the collective dreaming: Maxim Tsepkov, Grigory Petrov, Ekaterina Gudkova and Alexey Sidorin.
I already said that we received 83 applications for reports, which means that we had to reject five dozen applications . Just imagine, five dozen reports that you will not hear.
Everyone always talks only about the accepted reports, a sort of “survivor's systematic mistake”, but among the not accepted reports there is also a lot of high-quality material, so we decided to collect the most interesting thoughts and ideas from the reports that did not fit into the program.
If the conference in the future grows into a two-day format (and this is possible only by our joint efforts), then you have a chance to hear these thoughts in a detailed format. In the meantime, I will simply give them without specifying the authors.
I would be grateful if you write down what thoughts from the rejected applications would you like to disclose in more detail, argue with them, hear more fully in the framework of the report - we will definitely invite these speakers for next year.
During the break, you can walk around the exhibition area - this is the zone of the conference partners, where you can find out about interesting projects, news, technologies, talk and make appointments.
In addition, we invited representatives of the thematic communities in the field of knowledge management and e-learning, authors of Telegram channels, video blogs and podcasts, for example, KM Alliance, Knowledge Management - Northwest, Conveyorum, Write the Docs Russia, LX Notes, Spruce, to the conference - ELearning skills, St. Petersburg analyst community. Communicate and make connections.
Improving team health and learning how to build models
Let's start with the most interactive formats. The first in the program will be a very awakening master class “Atlassian Team Playbook - learn new development practices for your team!” from Anna Zekunova and Irina Pozdnyakova from ToolsTrek, a company that implements Atlassian products, including the beloved Confluence.
Atlassian Team Playbook - a set of team health monitors, which is accompanied by games to develop various aspects of teamwork. Initially, it was the Atlassian internal framework, but having achieved good results within the company, they decided to share it with the IT world. At the master class, the participants will be divided into project teams, each team will receive a case prepared in advance, and each participant will receive a description of his role.
Participants will follow the team’s health monitor and play a game to improve work efficiency.
By the way, this practice can be fully adopted and tried inside your company; all Atlassian materials have been made publicly available .
The second interactive format - workshop “Model in any context”from the trainer for applied rationality, co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality " Poker " Prapion Medvedeva . Models are very common among IT professionals, we often model or think that we are modeling in working situations, but models are not at all reduced to drawing diagrams in UML notation.
The prapion will tell and demonstrate in practice how to apply the skills of building models with causal relationships and dependencies, even in situations and contexts where you usually do not do this, such as on agile planning, when thinking through the development process, separation of responsibilities system architecture.
On real cases faced by the participants of the meeting, Prapion will show how to transfer modeling and ontological skills from areas in which you already know this to all the rest.
“Sell” the idea of knowledge management to management and colleagues
Among the conference participants there are those who are taking the first steps in knowledge management, but there will also be those who have already achieved certain results. And the further we advance in this process, the more support is needed for management and clear metrics to assess the effectiveness of our work.
When you establish processes for knowledge management, you are a kind of KM evangelist, sooner or later you will have to look for like-minded people, both among your closest colleagues and among the management who can allocate resources and act as a “patron” of the initiative. Knowledge management cannot be built without one or the other. Accordingly, you, as a driver of the initiative, will in any case double-sell your idea: to linear colleagues and superiors.
Is it possible to convince colleagues and managers with the same arguments? Which methods are better suited for both cases, and which are different? How to overcome resistance and arguments of the form “it was normal”?
The discussion “How to sell knowledge management ideas to management and colleagues” from the head of the Kaspersky Lab training and certification group Rodion Nagornov sets the goal of discussing and getting a list or even a “script” for selling knowledge management ideas in your company with a list of possible objections, counterarguments to them, as well as a list of metrics that can substantiate the importance of knowledge management practices.
We will definitely share this “artifact” after the conference, but better come and help us create it together.
We dream of applying technology for the benefit of knowledge management
The productive day will be completed by our experimental format - the session of the collective dream “Technologies of the future for knowledge management” . The event will be devoted to how to fill the gap between what tasks in the field of knowledge management I would like to solve automatically, and what technologies and how exactly to use for this.
We will discuss problems in the field of knowledge management and fantasize about how modern technologies (AI, web, Data Mining, Natural Language Processing, computer vision, etc.) can solve such problems. Together we will be able to look at the problem from different angles and think about possible solutions.
We would like the participants to come to the session a little prepared, throwing a list of problems that exist in the knowledge management in IT companies (for example, the initial filling of the knowledge base, outdated content and checking its completeness, semantic search, user involvement, etc.) , or by studying what technologies, research and concepts are already in the field of ML, AI, NLP, for example, here , and what features and limitations they have.
The best result of such a session, and of our entire conference, will be a real Proof of Concept , if one of the engineers from startups takes and tries to put the ideas into practice. Following the results of the session, we will definitely create a manifest with ideas and implementation options, it can be taken and started to be implemented.
The session will be led by Igor Tsupko , Director for Unknown at Flant , and Maxim Leonovich , co-founder of OneBar startup , will be among the experts . Maxim’s company creates and develops a solution that can process conversations in the Slack corporate messenger and creates a knowledge base of questions and answers. Of course, our speakers and PC members will join the collective dreaming: Maxim Tsepkov, Grigory Petrov, Ekaterina Gudkova and Alexey Sidorin.
Speak about missed speeches
I already said that we received 83 applications for reports, which means that we had to reject five dozen applications . Just imagine, five dozen reports that you will not hear.
Everyone always talks only about the accepted reports, a sort of “survivor's systematic mistake”, but among the not accepted reports there is also a lot of high-quality material, so we decided to collect the most interesting thoughts and ideas from the reports that did not fit into the program.
If the conference in the future grows into a two-day format (and this is possible only by our joint efforts), then you have a chance to hear these thoughts in a detailed format. In the meantime, I will simply give them without specifying the authors.
- If you organize interaction with developers - carriers of knowledge in a certain established format, this will minimize the cost of their working time and reduce overall resistance.
- The code and information closeness problems can be solved using the InnerSource methodology - when they approach the corporate program code as OpenSource, open access for reading, making pull requests.
- What to do if knowledge management is “late” and knowledge is already lost? There are two ways: the black box, when we move from the whole to the parts, knowing how the system behaves as a whole, and the white box, when we do not know anything about what surrounds the system, but we know how it is organized and move from parts to the whole. The advantage of the first approach is that it can be used to answer the questions “why” and “do we need it”, which will save time during further work. The advantage of the second is a quick answer to the question “how” and a quick visible result.
- If you have systemic problems in the transfer of knowledge and communication between teams, you can hold a field session where all participants in the process will intensively discuss problems, work out solutions, “sell” them to each other and test them on the spot.
- Developed practices of knowledge management and adaptation of beginners allow the company to rebuild in the market when hiring. It is important for future employees that they will not be a grain of sand abandoned by everyone, that the company has a built-in onboarding system, a corporate university and a desire to invest in training as a value at the company level. A knowledge-sharing culture and built onboarding rails can be served as a competitive advantage.
- To assess the effectiveness of the knowledge management system, you can use a metric of 3-5 seconds. During this time, the user can find any information stored in the knowledge base (i.e., not only will the user request be processed, but the user will be able to get to the desired page during this time).
- The dissemination and acquisition of new knowledge can serve as a motivation factor for developers. It is necessary to analyze and describe the profiles of your people and their differences, and, based on this, build a plan for the professional development of a person. It’s good to have well-designed company-wide profiles. Then you can transfer people between teams in the company, get the benefit from them for this company and not lose people.
- Searching for corporate information is not a business process, its business value is difficult to convey to management.
- The Subject Matter Experts (SME) methodology is experts in selected areas. SME processes the most complex cases and creates mature articles, monitors knowledge gaps in the technical support team, and periodically reviews the status of articles within its module or product.
- The knowledge base can be maintained using development tools - Git, doc-review as code-review, merge requests for approval of documentation, release policy for documentation: changelog, git tags, milestones in Gitlab, linter and tests, CI (auto assembly and web hooks).
- Visual thinking is when you draw pictures on a flipchart, or use graphic languages in engineering, and from this you get unprecedented mental results. But these are fairy tales. Thinking is not visual, but amodal (that is, not expressed in the modalities of perception - not visually, not audibly, not olfactory, etc.) in its unconscious part and is synesthetic (on the contrary, all modalities of perception intertwined together) in consciousness. It becomes visual at the moment when you need to communicate something to yourself or others. Visual thinking is utopian: it is extremely attractive in its argumentation, but in fact it is fruitless in practice.
- The process of adapting and transferring knowledge in R&D is different, because often you do not work only with the developments from your research group, you need to work also with projects of other scientists. An important part of research is attending scientific seminars and schools, this is a great opportunity to understand a topic in more detail in a communication format and helps beginners to adapt. That is, it is a kind of scientific community that helps to grow and develop.
- At the start, the trainee needs to be given tasks as close as possible to the tasks of a junior developer, for example, a fork of a real project. The developer constantly needs new challenges. It should grow along with the development of the project, if the project does not grow technologically, it is important to rotate so that there are always new tasks. The field of development is constantly changing - new technologies, frameworks, methodologies, approaches. Today's "seniors" in mass appraisal while working for a long time inside one non-developing project are degrading, not solving new problems.
I would be grateful if you write down what thoughts from the rejected applications would you like to disclose in more detail, argue with them, hear more fully in the framework of the report - we will definitely invite these speakers for next year.
And what else besides reports and discussion formats?
During the break, you can walk around the exhibition area - this is the zone of the conference partners, where you can find out about interesting projects, news, technologies, talk and make appointments.
In addition, we invited representatives of the thematic communities in the field of knowledge management and e-learning, authors of Telegram channels, video blogs and podcasts, for example, KM Alliance, Knowledge Management - Northwest, Conveyorum, Write the Docs Russia, LX Notes, Spruce, to the conference - ELearning skills, St. Petersburg analyst community. Communicate and make connections.
The first KnowledgeConf conference will be held on April 26, 2019 in Infospace at the address: 1st Zachatievsky Lane, Moscow, 4 - this is next to the metro stations Kropotkinskaya and Park Kultury.
See you at KnowledgeConf ! Follow the news on Habré, in the Telegram channel and ask questions in the conference chat .