Management Decisions Didn't Consider Knowledge Needs of Project

This is a story about an IT project. Management decided on a large platform change. A lot of relevant personnel were getting ready to retire. Leadership felt they didn’t need as much mid-level and contract personnel, and this had a big negative impact on the project. We ended up having to re-start, and that project is still going on.

Redeploying Valuable Expertise

This was a telecoms organisation facing a lot of changes in their technology and also their business environment. The tech people were moved to a regional organisation to cover the APAC region.

The business in Australia suffered because they were losing a lot of tech people to this regional organisation, and they had the most recent knowledge in their technology.

So what they did was to keep experts redeployed to other projects wherever they were needed, not just in this new APAC organisation - they became more mobile than they expected.

Under-experts

We have people with expertise that aren't being recognised or leveraged, eg staff with many years of experience in non-management positions. Then with an organisation restructuring, we hired in new managers from outside, and asked those non-management staff to bring the new managers up to speed in their areas of expertise. Why would they?

Scattered

We do job rotation a lot in our organisation. It helps to move knowledge around, improves networking, and ensures people know different aspects of the business. But with all the restructuring we have been doing recently, it's difficult to keep track of who knows what, so we can scatter and lose our knowledge this way as well.