Implementing a Knowledge Centric Culture

In the struggle to fix problems faster, an overlooked aspect of problem management is ensuring the knowledge around how the problems and their fixes are created and kept up to date. If you focus on merely a single problem it is indeed faster to solve an issue when you have the expert knowledge and can fix with what you remember. The problem lies with what is not done in this scenario that would enable: better resolution of the issue the next time, in a smarter way, by others, or with a fix.

Before closing out any problem, every fix and solution you implement needs to be documented. Anyone else in the company should be able to solve themselves from this documentation, and potentially understand enough to remove the need for knowledge via a permanent solution.

Process Enforcing Knowledge

One way of ensuring knowledge is maintained / captured with each problem solved is: add in a step as part of your problem workflow to ensure the knowledge from the ticket is captured before the ticket is considered fully closed. Add a follow-up step post resolution and have a queue for the team to review at a later time to ensure the knowledge has been captured around the solution for the issue. You can architect the workflow to consider the ticket resolved once the problem itself has been resolved as to not impact your resolution times when adding this requirement.

Reduce Barriers to Knowledge

Reducing barriers to capturing knowledge will help with adoption. Have a standardized and documented way to search, update, and add to the knowledge base. Answer these questions to see what barriers you might have in your current process:

• Do you have existing knowledge article about this issue?

• Is the existing knowledge article up to date?

• Is the existing knowledge article easy to find?

• How can people confirm there is not an existing knowledge article?

• Do you have simple defined requirements when a knowledge article needs to be created about which data points and where to store?

Creating standardized process and documentation around capturing the information into your knowledge base will speed up their adoption.

Needed Knowledge or a Problem?

Lastly consider knowledge to be a limitation of your service or product which should be fixed (unless the knowledge is part of your understanding your business). Ask yourself if the existence of this knowledge is a benefit to the company or does its existence mean there is a problem which should be addressed? Let people know that knowledge entry means this is something which should be looked at and potentially addressed in the future. When people understand there is an added benefit to this knowledge culture they should be more inclined to participate.