Some thoughts that popped up on my first day of attending our Poppendieck course on 23th of June.

Knowledge inventory

The concept of “Zero Inventory” is not desirable and in fact does not hold in Toyota (go to the production plant and notice the trucks on the park yard outside the factory with inventory waiting to load it into the factory – the drivers are sleeping some times), its all about having the correct amount of inventory.
So! Mary keeps a log book containing what programs she installed on her laptop and what problems she experienced (hope she doesn't mind me telling this in public). When there is a problem on the laptop, she goes to look into the log book instead of googling it again spending time on finding the same site as 6 months ago, wasting time on finding already acquired knowledge – relearning, which is waste.  
Well. This log book is knowledge inventory. Knowledge that we keep close to us, ready to use, but it takes up space and the more we have, the more difficult it is to find the knowledge we need. In software we do not have physical inventory, like wheels ready put on a car in a car factory plant, but we have knowledge inventory. So how do we produce the correct amount of knowledge inventory?

Knowledge briefs

Lets go to the source. When we make knowledge and put it into our repository (perhaps a wiki), we should make the knowledge condense, then it is easier to find - and use. But it is difficult to make knowledge brief! If I make a four page documentation of a feature, and come back six months later, I will spend time  

Because knowledge in wikis are knowledge inventory, and tend to grow and grow. Too much get a burden, you cannot find things and when you find a document, its four pages long and the valuable knowledge is hidden in a lot of irrelevant noise. (Can search engines solve the problem of finding useful knowledge in a split second on the internet? I don't think so.)

So what about a wiki that have limited space? You can only put 2400 characters on a page, because if you put on more, you build up too much knowledge inventory. “If you cannot fit your knowledge into an A3, use an A4”. Constrain yourself to condense it even more – extract the important parts e.g. the exceptions in the business case that you only found out about later, and spent time on trying to grasp.  

I want to make an exercise on our next workshop to practice the art of making knowledge brief, to avoid building up knowledge inventory.
And last thoughts: Are knowledge always written? Can you build condensed knowledge in pictures and graphs?

By Jesper Thaning