How Our IT Knowledge Transfer Plan Works
Our knowledge transfer plan doesn’t simply target institutional knowledge, it also focuses on transferring tacit knowledge — the soft skills, key relationships, and other abilities that are difficult for your experts to communicate to successors. Part of our succession planning involves one of Steve Trautman Co.’s certified consultants helping you carry out the knowledge transfer, which usually unfolds in the following steps:
Step 1: Identify & Prioritize Knowledge Risk Areas
To begin, our certified facilitator engages your team in a highly structured Q&A to recognize the unique knowledge areas of your target expert or executive. This discussion session is simple and is usually completed within an hour.
We then record the Q&A results in our Knowledge Silo Matrix — a data-driven framework that enables you to spot at-risk knowledge areas for your team and business. These risks are prioritized during the knowledge transfer and will determine what knowledge gets transferred first and to whom.
To prevent an information bottleneck from forming, we recommend that you choose multiple successors so that the knowledge is spread across several people.
Step 2: Break Down Priority Areas into Teachable Tasks
The next step is to sit down with your IT expert or executive and have a deep-reaching one-on-one interview. The priority is to quickly build a complete picture of all the work your expert does and help them break down their knowledge into bite-sized “tasks” — tasks are specific duties that your expert can teach to successors within an hour.
With the data from the interview, we create Skill Development Plans that organize the tasks in order of priority and provide the resources needed to guide successors during the learning process. This knowledge transfer plan strategically charts every necessary learning hour required to achieve proficiency and can be tailored to fit within an outgoing expert’s remaining days with your company.
Step 3: Train Participants to Transfer Knowledge Effectively
Not everyone is a natural teacher or an attentive learner, so our facilitator teaches your team proven knowledge transfer techniques. We also provide your company with six powerful proprietary tools that enable you to run successful knowledge transfer sessions.
Step 4: Transfer Knowledge
Now that your expert or executive has the tools to pass on their expertise, the actual IT knowledge transfer can begin.
Execution of the knowledge transfer plan may be spread over weeks or months at the discretion of the team and involves structured and highly efficient sessions between the target expert and their successors. Our facilitator will remain on hand to monitor early sessions and troubleshoot should troubles arise.
Step 5: Test & Measure Knowledge Transfer
To ensure that the knowledge transfer has been successfully completed, we give your team a knowledge transfer test — a hallmark of our data-driven process. Our test effectively determines whether or not your IT expert was able to transfer their knowledge successfully and if the successors can perform the tasks independently.
Lastly, before completing our services, our facilitator guides the successors in creating a list of existing resources (e.g. documentation, templates, samples, contacts) that they can reference after the departing expert’s final day.
Knowledge Transfer Tools
As our client, you will have access to our suite tools that have been proven to effectively facilitate knowledge transfers for thousands of IT industry experts and executives.
- Knowledge Silo Matrix: identifies at-risk knowledge areas for your team and business and helps determine possible successors.
- Skill Development Plans: breaks down your experts tacit IT knowledge into tangible skills that can be taught and learned in one hour.
- Knowledge Transfer Test Questions: measure knowledge transfer progress and confirm that successors have the ability to perform tasks independesuccessful knowledgently.
Knowledge Transfer Stories From The IT Industry
Here is one of our most recent case studies in the information technology industry.
