Knowledge Management in International Standards: ISO, PMI

Hello. Six months have already passed since KnowledgeConf 2019 , during which time I managed to speak at two more conferences and give lectures on the topic of knowledge management in two large IT companies. Communicating with colleagues, I realized that in IT you can still talk about knowledge management at the "beginner" level, or rather, just realize that knowledge management is necessary for any department of any company. Today there will be a minimum of my own experience - I would like to consider the existing international standards in the field of knowledge management.

Let's start, probably, with the most popular brand in the field of standardization - ISO . Imagine, there is a whole separate standard dedicated to knowledge management systems (ISO 30401: 2018). But today I would not dwell on it. Before understanding the “how” the knowledge management system should look and work, it is necessary to agree that it is, in principle, necessary.

Take, for example, ISO 9001: 2015 (Quality management systems). As the name implies, this is a standard dedicated to a quality management system. To be certified according to this standard, the organization must ensure the transparency and continuity of work processes and manufactured products and / or services. In other words, a certificate means that everything works in your company clearly, harmoniously, you understand what risks the current organization of processes carries, know how to control these risks, and strive to minimize them.

What does knowledge management have to do with it? But with this:

7.1.6 Organization knowledge

The organization shall determine the knowledge necessary for the functioning of its processes and to achieve conformity of products and services.

Knowledge should be maintained and accessible to the necessary extent.

When considering changing needs and trends, the organization should take into account its existing knowledge and determine how to obtain or provide access to additional knowledge and its actualization.

NOTE 1. Organization knowledge is organization-specific knowledge; mainly derived from experience.

Knowledge is information that is used and exchanged to achieve the goals of the organization.

NOTE 2. The basis of the organization’s knowledge may be:

a) internal sources (e.g., intellectual property; knowledge gained from experience; conclusions drawn from unsuccessful or successful projects; collection and exchange of undocumented knowledge and experience; results from improvements to processes, products and services);

b) external sources (for example, standards, the scientific community, conferences, knowledge gained from consumers and external suppliers).

And below, in the applications:

The requirements related to the organization’s knowledge were introduced with the aim of:

a) protecting the organization from loss of knowledge, for example by:

• staff turnover;
• inability to receive and exchange information;

b) stimulating the organization to acquire knowledge, for example, based on:

• first-hand learning;
• mentoring;
• benchmarking.

So, the ISO standard in the field of quality management states that in order to ensure the quality of its activities, an enterprise must engage in knowledge management. Exactly so, no alternative - "must . " Otherwise nonconformity, and goodbye. This fact alone hints at the fact that this is not an optional aspect in the organization, how knowledge management in IT is often referred to, but a mandatory component of business processes.

Moreover, the standard describes what risks knowledge management is designed to eliminate. In fact, they are quite obvious.

Let's imagine ... no, it’s not so - please recall the situation from your career when you really needed some information at work, and its only medium was at that time on vacation / business trip, generally quit the company or was just sick. Remembered? I think almost any of us have had to deal with this. What did you feel at that moment?

If, after some time, the management of the unit analyzes the failure to meet the project deadlines, it will, of course, find the guilty party and calm down on this. But you personally, at that moment when the knowledge was needed, did not help in any way the understanding that "it is the fault of the RM who went to Bali and did not leave any instructions in case of questions." Of course, he is to blame. But your task will not help.

If knowledge is documented in a system accessible to people who may need it, then the described “resort” story becomes almost impossible. Thus, the continuity of business processes is ensured, which means that vacations, departures of employees and the notorious bus factor are not scary for the company - the quality of the product / service will remain at its usual level.

If the company has a platform for the exchange and storage of information and experience, and a culture (habit) of using this platform is formed, then employees do not have to wait a few days for a response from a colleague (or even look for a colleague for several days) and set it because of this on hold your tasks.

Why am I talking about habit? Because it’s not enough to make a knowledge base to be used. We are all used to looking for answers to our questions on Google, and the intranet is most often associated with vacation applications and a bulletin board. We don’t have the habit of “looking for information about Agile frameworks” (for example) on the intranet. Therefore, even if we have the coolest knowledge base in one second, nobody will start using it for the next second (and even for the next month) - there is no habit. Changing your habits is painful and long. Not everyone is ready for this. Especially if 15 years "and worked the same way." But without this, the initiative to work with knowledge in the company will fail. That is why masters in the field of KM inextricably link knowledge management with change management.

It is also worth paying attention to the fact that “When considering changing needs and trends, an organization should take into account its knowledge ...”, i.e. to develop a culture of referring to previous experience in decision-making in a changing world. And mind you, again, a “must . "

By the way, in this small paragraph of the standard a lot is said about experience. Usually, when it comes to knowledge management, stereotypes begin to palm off a picture of the knowledge base with hundreds of documents placed in the form of files (regulations, requirements). But ISO speaks of experience. The knowledge gained based on the past experience of the company and each of its employees is the very thing that avoids the risk of repeated mistakes, immediately make more profitable decisions and even create a new product. In the most mature companies in the field of knowledge management (including Russian ones, by the way), knowledge management is seen as a means of increasing the company's capitalization, creating new products, developing new ideas and streamlining processes. This is not a knowledge base; it is a mechanism for innovation. The PMBOK PMI Guide helps us understand this in more detail.

PMBOK - a guide to the body of knowledge on project management, the PMa handbook. In the sixth edition (2016) of this manual, a section appeared on the project integration management, which, in turn, included a subsection on project knowledge management. This item was created “based on comments from users of the manual”, i.e. became a product of experience in using previous versions of the guide in real conditions. And reality required knowledge management!

The main output of the new paragraph is the “Register of lessons learned” (in the ISO standard described above, by the way, it is also mentioned). Moreover, according to the manual, the compilation of this register should be carried out throughout the implementation of the project, and not at its completion, when it comes time to analyze the result. In my opinion, this has a lot in common with retrospectives in agile, but about this I will write a separate post. Literally, the text in PMBOK sounds like this:

Project knowledge management is the process of using existing knowledge and creating new knowledge to achieve project goals and facilitate learning in the organization.

The field of knowledge “project integration management” requires combining the results obtained in all other areas of knowledge.

Emerging trends in integration processes include, but are not limited to:

...

• Project knowledge management

The increasingly mobile and changing nature of the workforce requires a more rigorous process of determining knowledge throughout the life cycle of the project and transferring it to target audiences so as to eliminate the loss of knowledge

***

The key benefits of this process are that the previously acquired knowledge of the organization is used to obtain or improve the results of the project, and the knowledge gained during the implementation of the current project remains available to ensure the operational activities of the organization and future projects or their phases. This process is carried out throughout the project.

I will not copy here the entire large section of the manual. You can familiarize yourself with it yourself and draw the appropriate conclusions. The above quotes, in my opinion, are quite enough. It seems to me that the presence of such a detailed description of the RM's task in managing project knowledge already indicates the importance of this aspect when working on projects. By the way, I often hear the thesis: “Who needs our knowledge in other departments?” That is, who needs these learned lessons?

In fact, one can often see that the unit sees itself as a "unit in a vacuum." Here we are with our library, and here is the rest of the company, and knowledge of our library will not be useful to her in any way. About the library - maybe. And what about the related processes?

A banal example: in the course of work on a project, interaction with a contractor took place. For example, with a designer. The contractor turned out to be so-so, disrupted deadlines, refused to modify without additional payment. The RM recorded in the register of lessons learned that it is not worth working with this unreliable contractor. At the same time, somewhere in marketing they were also looking for a designer and came across the same contractor. And at this moment there are two options:

a) if the company has a good culture of reusing experience, a marketing colleague will look in the register of lessons learned if someone has already contacted this contractor, see a negative feedback from our RM and will not lose time and money communicating with this unreliable contractor.

b) if the company does not have such a culture, the marketer will turn to the same unreliable contractor, lose company money, time and can disrupt an important and urgent promotional campaign, for example.

Which option seems more successful? And note, not information about the product being developed was useful, but about the processes involved in the development. And it turned out to be useful not to another RM, but to an employee of a completely different direction. Hence the conclusion: you can not consider development separately from sales, technical support from business intelligence, and IT from AKU. Everyone in the company has work experience that will prove useful to someone else in the company. And it is not necessary that they will be representatives of related areas.

However, the technical side of the project may come in handy. Try to audit projects in your company over the past few years. You will be surprised how many bicycles were invented when solving similar problems. Why? Because the processes of sharing knowledge are not established.

So, knowledge management, according to the PMI guidelines, is one of the tasks of RMa. As you can see, two well-known organizations that conduct paid certification according to their standards include knowledge management in the lists of masthead tools for quality control and work on projects. Why do managers at IT companies still believe that knowledge management is documentation? Why do the cooler and the smoking room remain the centers of knowledge exchange? It is all about understanding and habits. I hope that gradually understanding of the field of knowledge management and IT managers will become more and more, and the oral tradition will cease to serve as a tool for maintaining knowledge in the company. Learn the standards of your work - they have a lot of interesting things!