Often, we are asked to capture employee knowledge for our clients when an employee leaves a position, for example when the employee transfers, takes a new position, or needs to take short-term leave. Capturing what the employee knows is critical, not only to teach and guide their replacement, but also to prevent employee knowledge from being lost forever.
A large multi-national transportation company.
An employee in the IT department was retiring unexpectedly after four decades of service to the business. Because of his extensive involvement in different functions of the business, his knowledge was vast, especially in the areas of technology. Writing Connections was tasked with gathering his knowledge, particularly for a financial revenue system. The goal was for the documentation to act as both instructional material for those taking over certain job responsibilities, as well as reference information for employees working in related roles.
We knew that accuracy and timeliness were of the upmost importance for this particular project. Because the client was trying to train employees at the same time that we gathered content, we all met together in a series of recorded calls to step through the financial revenue system and ask clarifying questions. Our documentation process consisted of these steps:
We identified 9 major processes within the financial revenue system. This initial step provided the foundation for understanding the overall structure and scope of the system.
Because the processes were interdependent, we created a flowchart that showed how each process fed into another within the system. This visual representation made it easier to spot dependencies, bottlenecks, and potential areas for improvement.
We had a meeting (or several meetings) for each process with the retiring employee, digging into code and describing the flow. These sessions were time-consuming, but invaluable, as the employee helped identify dead code or explained the thought process and significance behind the original code. Because he had been with the company for so long and had such intimate knowledge of the code, he held that insider knowledge that very few people in the company could claim.
Once a process was documented, it was distributed to the entire team for review. This way we received feedback not only from the retiring employee, but also from the rest of the team. This review methodology ensured that the team understood the knowledge that was being captured and that we were capturing all the details thoroughly.
With final approval from the team, we considered a document for a process complete.
We produced a set of nine Microsoft Word documents that explained the system’s dependencies and functionality. The documentation served both as instructional material and as a reliable reference for employees taking over the retiring staff member’s responsibilities.
Our client was very pleased that we were able to document so much of the employee’s knowledge before his retirement. By capturing decades of specialized knowledge, the final documents ensured that critical system understanding would remain accessible long after the employee’s departure.
Usually, Writing Connections produces technical content and moves on to the next project until updates are needed. We do not often know how our documentation benefits the customer in a concrete way. But in this case, we found out that months after the employee retired, the financial revenue system that we documented went down. A system outage is a costly issue since minutes of downtime for this system equates to millions of dollars. The newly backfilled employees were able to refer to Writing Connection’s documentation, identify the problem, and remedy the situation quickly.
If you are ready to tackle your next knowledge capture and want someone experienced to guide you through the process, we are ready to talk.
