Knowledge Transfer for Global Roles in GSE

This practice paper presents how a software engineering organization spread across three countries successfully transferred the knowledge of a few identified roles for a large mission-critical software system that had to conform to regulatory requirements. Multiple releases of the system have been delivered to customers over the 15 years it has been in the market. Each release of the product had a focus area. The competence availability for these focus areas was distributed. As a natural evolution of the globally distributed team, greater responsibility is devolved to a particular location, based on the availability of the competence at that location. Moving the increased responsibility to a location, created a global role, which did not exist earlier. Building the new role required a new skill, what is unique about a global role. Equipping the team members in the new skill was necessary to take up the roles effectively and quickly. The first step was the identification of the competence for a function/role, training for which may be imparted to another person, who will take over the function/role. This is followed by a process of knowledge transfer, which ensured that a person can take up a new global role from another location. Prioritization based on ease of knowledge transfer for different areas of work, that was found to be effective is described. This helped reduce possible problems that could occur due to incorrect or incomplete transfer of knowledge. The advantages by such knowledge transfer that resulted in new persons taking up global roles have outweighed its disadvantages. The practices described are generic and can be applied to any organization of similar size and complexity.