Not in code

I chanced upon this thought provoking quote by John Holt on Josh Kaufman’s blog.

Since we can’t know what knowledge will be most needed in the future, it is senseless to try to teach it in advance. Instead, we should try to turn out people who love learning so much and learn so well that they will be able to learn whatever needs to be learned.

Josh has also put together something he calls The Personal MBA, which is at its essence, a reading list of 40 books. Of course there’s more to it than this but you’ll have you read its manifesto to find out the rest.

I’ve missed my weekly dose of pre-packaged knowledge since finishing my Masters degree so I was pleased when I discovered that several universities now offer free podcasts.

In particular I enjoyed listening to the first episode of the Marketing Podcast by Peter Wagstaff. It appears to be designed to accompany MKF1120 a marketing subject taught at Monash University in Melbourne. The first episode is arranged as a conversation between Peter and a guy called Julian Cole (the “good looking” one apparently). They discuss product placement as an alternative to traditional advertising which they say consumers have lost interest in for the most part. They use Big Brother Australia as a case study as it seems almost entirely a product placement or advertising exercise.

If you’d like to learn a little about marketing and share my propensity for laziness I suggest you give this podcast a whirl. All in all I think it’s pretty well made and I will probably continue listening to the remaining and any future episodes.

Finally, a few universities with free podcasts are:

• University of Sydney
• University of Melbourne
• Stanford University
• University of California, Berkley (one isn’t enough!)

If you know of any other good, university podcasts please let me know by emailing me. Comments are still broken, sorry.

I could tell straight away that I will enjoy learning about this topic! I relish opportunities to expand and enrich my vocabulary and already this course has introduced me to a few new concepts.

A couple that stand out as I recollect the first two lectures are the distinction between data, information and knowledge; and the classification of knowledge into explicit and tacit knowledge. Colin�s discussion of Generation Y was also intriguing, appealing even – I need to research this some more.

I agreed with his comments about the disconnect between IT and business, this is something that agile methods like eXtreme Programming (XP) recognise and work actively to address; in XP this is via the practice of an Onsite Customer. I am however curious to see how this relates to KM and if and how it is addressed.

A challenge I face professionally relates to the question of how to achieve effective knowledge transfer in a rapidly growing team. We have grown from ~8 to ~32 developers and several business analysts and testers in a short period. So far we have relied on the XP practice of Pair Programming and other forms of face-to-face communication while attempting to manipulate team structure and size by breaking into smaller sub-teams.

My own experience has been that informal, face-to-face communication is an excellent means of knowledge transfer when the team size is still small (5-10 people), however as the team grows so do the associated costs. I hope this course lends some clues about how to manage knowledge transfer in larger rapidly changing teams especially those that keep growing and where limiting this growth isn�t really an option.

What are the tools, techniques and principles that have worked for others? Why?

I also look forward to contrasting and comparing some of the views which have been and will be put forward with familiar values and principles of XP and the agile software development community. Colin made a comment about software development being composed of 80% explicit knowledge and 20% tacit knowledge when discussing the hybrid model. Many proponents of agile methods, including myself, would probably state the ratio differently with tacit knowledge being 80%. In fact many agilists, refer to themselves as craftsmen not engineers. I am curious to further explore the basis of his assertion as at least on the surface I feel it contradicts my own views.

Finally, I can tell that there will be plenty an opportunity to apply what I will learn in this course: at my current job, in my personal learning, and in future roles – particularly if (when) I succeed in my ambition of running my own software firm one day.