We have recently polled our company wide wiki users and found out that there are two large groups of users:
Each group covered almost 50% of the users!
How do your companies handle this? That is, how do you encourage your busiest / most knowledgeable people to share their knowledge?
You can point out to the knowledge holders that they are likely spending a lot of time getting pestered by questions anyway. Writing a wiki entry is a short term investment that pays off in the long run. If they aren't getting pestered by questions, it's probably not important enough to document.
Also, the knowledge receivers are a better choice to write a wiki article than you might think, because they understand the point of view of someone who needs to learn the topic. It also helps organize and solidify their thoughts. Having someone with more time write the article and run it by the guru for review could be very beneficial.
One of our tech leads has a great policy, the third time she gets the same question, she writes up the answer and emails it to the person asking and to the knowlege wiki we have set up. Since she was probably going to write that email anyway, the only additional work is to add the address for the Wiki.
I suggest recording screencasts of about 45 mins. Get everyone together and the presenter does a screencast and transfers the knowledge. It's easier and more effective to show how to do something, then just written documentation (which might also include extra time for formatting, etc.)
At one place I used to work, they had a "Lunch n'learn" on a weekly or monthly basis. One guy eats lunch early, and does a presentation for the team while they eat. This might work if people are strapped for time.
The best way to transfer knowledge is for the people who need the knowledge to work with those who have the knowledge.
Whilst the knowledgeable people may not have the time to work on documenting their knowledge themselves, they may already be spending some of their time explaining to others what to do and how to do it.
Even if the knowledgeable people had the time to write up their knowledge, it is not necessarily the case that the documentation they produced would be of use to the less knowledgeable people. It is surprisingly easy to miss out important 'obvious' information when trying to impart knowledge.
By making the knowledge transfer more explicit and co-operative, and having the users of that documentation write it so that they can understand it, you could both ease the burden on the knowledgeable people and get more information transferred.
If the knowledgeable people are really pressed for time, you could ask the people who need that knowledge to write up what they understand now, and then have the knowledgeable people proof-read and correct any misunderstandings. This could substantially speed things up, and could also help identify areas where the knowledge is lacking.
As an example of this, I work on scientific software. Neither I nor the facility scientists I work with could, alone, document much of the software I write. I could explain what my software does and even why it does it that way, but it's the facility scientists who need to write documentation on why and how visiting scientists should use it.
My suggestion is to budget documentation time into every project and make it part and parcel of what you do. If you haven't been doing that all along you probably need to schedlue "Documentation Days" to jumpstart things (for example, say every Friday after lunch those with the knowledge are freed from all other projects and just work on writing documentation).
It can be hard to get the documentation culture into a company when it's never been part of the way things were done before, but the rewards are evident when you can hire a new person and have them up to speed and working independently within a week -- For example, the PostgreSQL project has a strong culture of maintaining excellent documentation. Their manual is better than some commercial products.
There is an unfortunate trend in my experience when it comes to knowledge transfer and that is the lack of interest on the receiving end. You could have the person willing to do the brain dump to someone else but if there is no interest in its receipt why would the expert take the time?
When I was leaving several places where I worked I was asked to do this because I was one of the very few people who understood the systems I was supporting but when someone was assigned to me for this task I could see in their demeanor that this was bothersome to them and they had no interest in it. So my motivation to do the knowledge transfer was basically reduced to nothing.
So the only thing that I could suggest on the subject is make sure the person receiving knowledge is actually interested in the subject. Captive audience that asks questions does wonders for motivation of the speaker.
I always try to set up a wiki in order to document things. Wikis are simple and encourage adding bits and pieces as time goes by. With formal documentation systems, the blank paper seems overwhelming to the users and as a result only gets filled out when you put a gun to their head. I usually walk around with a notebook, and I'd enter things in the wiki so that they can be located easily - this way, annual tasks can be repeated correctly rather than having to rediscover how they were supposed to happen.
One previous boss was only willing to permit "full and complete documents" which were never done. He banned wikis because he believed that they encouraged lax thinking and poor documentation. Since the previous "full and complete documents" were all 5+ years old at the time I left, he did not care to comprehend that his desires were in direct opposition to how his staff worked.
Only in the direst emergency when one critical person left, he made and recorded webcasts of walking through the code that only he understood. This was one of the few times that when an employee gave notice, that he transferred knowledge, instead of working on stuff until the day he left.
This is really a policy problem, not a motivation one. Employees with critical knowledge should be given the opportunity and to document it and it should be mandatory. If they do not provide ample documentation and their supervisors have given them enough "free" time to do it, they should be disciplined.
No matter how much a person knows or can accomplish, if they are the only one with that knowledge, then they are a liability. Documentation shouldn't be optional.
