Outformations

In software development there are many ways to transfer the knowledge about how to build a product to the people who do the actual building. Production can be severely hampered, however, if that knowledge is being produced more rapidly than it can be consumed. This is the knowledge transfer bottleneck.

• Documentation - The workers were given written instructions (22 steps worth) for building the airplane.
• Reverse Engineering - The workers were given a completed airplane which they could study in order to reproduce the steps required to build it.
• Mentoring - The “chief designer” built an airplane step by step and the workers replicated each step as it was performed.

The experiment was conducted in two phases. In the first phase, all 8 participants used the Documentation method. In the second phase, one team of 4 tried Reverse Engineering, while the other team of 4 tried Mentoring.

The results were interesting. Using the Documentation method, only one person out of a total of 8 came close to being able to build the airplane at all in the 5-minute period allotted.

Using the Reverse Engineering method, 1 person out of a total of 4 produced a completed airplane in 5 minutes.

Using the Mentoring method, each of 4 team members produced a completed airplane, and in less than the 5 minutes available.

The knowledge transfer bottleneck in software

In a software development effort, knowledge transfer takes place all the time, and it’s easy to imagine a software developer in the “chief designer” role described in the exercise above.

Let’s say I’m a developer who has discovered, and written the code to implement, a technique for binding some data to the controls in a user interface, and that this technique forms a pattern that my fellow developers want to know about. If you were one of my fellow developers, would you rather I (a) gave you a document I had written about the technique, (b) told you where the code was and suggested you figure it out for yourself, or (c) paired with you to implement the pattern for a new set of data?

Now, certainly, pairing with you takes more of my time, and might seem less efficient from my viewpoint. After all, I could be off designing the next pattern, and the one after that. But the  productivity of the team as a whole, rather than my personal productivity, is what’s important. And mentoring helps increase the team’s productivity by avoiding knowledge transfer bottlenecks.