I want to help you become a better consumer of your options for building and assessing a knowledge transfer strategy. As I said at the start of this blog series, people throw the term strategy around in business so loosely that it’s in danger of losing its meaning. This post should help you determine what you mean when you say knowledge transfer strategy by listing the attributes that any good, robust knowledge transfer strategy should have. Whether you are developing a strategy in-house or buying a process from an outside source, you may want to consider the importance of including these attributes in your strategic plan.
What Makes a Good Knowledge Transfer Strategy?
Your strategy should do these things:
- Ensure clear ownership of the knowledge transfer strategy and define the key job roles to be played/included/affected by your knowledge transfer program.
- Facilitate and communicate the alignment of your executives’ knowledge transfer expectations so that their vision is clear to each other and to the larger organization.
- Show how the knowledge transfer strategy will hook into all your other strategies, e.g. business strategy, talent management strategy, operational strategy, brand strategy, etc.
- Guide adoption of a knowledge transfer tool set that will make the program sufficiently methodical and measurable for the identified business needs. Include how the tools will fit into other HR systems such as performance reviews.
- Actively address the importance of knowledge transfer activities (such as when the expert and apprentice meet) and clarify how to prioritize this work in relation to other daily tasks.
- Give direction on budgets to pay for knowledge transfer activities including initial program set up and ongoing maintenance as well as budgets to pay for experts’ and apprentices’ billable time where that needs to be addressed.
- States what you’re not going to do to support knowledge transfer so that all operational plans will remain tight and focused on the most important tasks.
Every good knowledge transfer strategy should have some combination of these elements.
Now that you’ve read through the list, I’d love comments. What am I missing that you’ve found valuable?
