Friday, March 29, 2013
Insights and Opinions: Document your tribal knowledge
What would you do if a key employee walked away or was hit by a bus? Dave Berkus talks about why it's important to document the "tribal knowledge" in your company in our latest Insights and Opinions contribution.
It is not common for the CEO of a rapidly growing company to think of slowing down the furious pace enough to have each manager (including the CEO) document the job process managed, as well as see to the documentation for each process managed below.
And it is even more of a challenge to consider documenting the tribal knowledge of a company's key employees. Examples include forcing the entire sales and customer support team to use a single database such as SalesForce or Sugar or Act to document the interactions with prospects and customers, or using "REM" statements liberally inside software code to notify future coders of critical information contained and reasons for making code branches, assigning variables with unusual names or more.
As CEO, have you made a list of your critical chain of advisors, including bankers, accountants, industry advisors, and more? Do you have a "secret spot" for critical information someone might need if you were incapacitated or worse? (More...)
Read the rest of Documenting your tribal knowledge.