I ended up talking about knowledge management quite a bit at Agile Games 2018 and Mob Programming 2018. I don’t have a lot of formal training in this area, but it’s something that I’ve focused on a lot, and I’ve learned a lot from people who have studied it a great deal. Rather than respond directly, I decided to add a blog post about it, to benefit more people. This is an unordered list of these tips. I would love to hear your additions or feedback on it.
Push vs Pull Communication Channels
There are two different general ways of communicating information: Push and Pull. Push is when you send information out to recipients and they get notified (email, Twitter, Slack, etc) and Pull is when the recipient seeks out that information that was published earlier (Website, wiki, CMS, documentation). Using the wrong type can prevent the recipients from having the most recent information in a timely manner. The main deciding factor is, is it more important that people know about this information as soon as possible (changes to policy, status/availability updates, issues), or that people have the information when they need it (requirements, specifications, resources, environment details). Many tools can do both, like wikis, which allow people to get notified of updates). Email doesn’t work nearly as well as you would think at either push or pull, because most people in technical fields get so many emails that they find it hard to both notice and respond to timely emails and categorize those emails so they can find them later.Continue reading