How can you retain institutional knowledge when attrition is increasing?
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As an industry, IT is poor at creating documentation so that we don’t lose institutional knowledge when someone leaves the organization. The problem is that we're not thinking about things like job shadowing and knowledge sharing like we used to decades ago. We're focused on our organization’s specific needs and we don't think about the cross-pollination aspect. That’s when you get into situations where your direct report suddenly gets a great job that’s perfect for their career, but you’re screwed as an organization.
The problem is even worse because the rate of change itself is doing that so much. We don't even have the capacity to do cross training and it's a case of insufficient time and resources.
But we don't make the time to do cross training. And sometimes you will get push back from your teams if you don't instill this into the culture, because they think, “Why do I care about what John's doing over there? I like what I'm doing.” It's important to think about it as a holistic issue and ingrain that as part of your culture.
Documentation is key when dealing with increased attrition. We’ve had a false sense of security in thinking that if someone leaves, we can always get a contractor for the time-being to temporarily fill in. But in that case you're still losing out on the business knowledge that person accumulated. We’re too quick to say, “We’ll just get a consultant in and fix it that way.”