Optimum retention of knowledge in a complex programme

• Main Author: Ola, Jeannievilyn
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2014
• Subjects: Business Administration, Management, and Operations
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_masteral/4731
• Institution: De La Salle University

There are different challenges faced by a Project every day. Being in a complex programme, consisting of several projects, one of the biggest challenge is retaining the knowledge within the organization. There are a lot of factors affecting a programme: regulatory compliance, changes in the scope of the project, timeline, cost of project and the availability of the employees. Frequent changes are inevitable. New joiners are expected to grasp the concept and the objective of the Programme fast, but the reality for our Programme, it takes a year to do so. For this study, I continued my first cycle of Action Research on the Knowledge Management concept focusing on how to retain the knowledge within the Programme when there is no proper governance on documentations. New joiners lack the knowledge they need to be effective in their work. The movement (Attrition and Mobility) of the current employee is fast. On top of this, some of the Subject Matter Experts, SMEs, have already left the company. The knowledge that theyve gained are lost because there is no system or process to manage or mitigate this kind of risk. I want to address the issue on how to optimally retain the knowledge of the SMEs within the Programme. Being a Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) organization, the knowledge and expertise of the employee is our actual competitive advantage. We are regarded to be the subject matter experts in our fields. Issues on knowledge management were gathered from the different workstream leads through meetings. With this, I proposed the on-boarding training to address the overall issues I have collated. The intervention, implementation of on-boarding training, took me 1.5 years and 5 runs to implement. I wanted to create a knowledge sharing culture in our programme. I also aimed to shorten span of learning of our new joiners by means of retaining the knowledge of the existing employees. Feedback forms and meetings were the methods used to measure the effectiveness of the on-boarding training. The result of the intervention was as expected in terms of impact and importance, but on expansion, coverage and the demand, it was more than what I expected. My Action Research helped me understand more about the needs of my Programme, the importance of having the right influence when creating change and what other interventions that can be adopted to further address this issue.