Ideal Size of a dedicated Knowledge Management team

Deepak G

Hello Team,

I would like to understand as to what would be the ideal size of a dedicated Knowledge Management team for an organization of size 800-1000 employees (as per TSIA's recommendations).

What are the parameters you will consider for deciding this?

How big a factor would the organization's size be in deciding this?

Neal Hatton

Hi Deepak,

Some of the considerations include the following, in my opinion:

1. The fully-burdened cost of the knowledge management team should not exceed the savings from the customer deflected support cases (ie self-help), junior employee training/upskilling, and productivity gains that the knowledge management system is generating.
2. The knowledge management team needs to be large enough to have critical mass to survive turnover in the team, long vacations, leaves of absence, etc.
3. What you are having the knowledge management team do is a big factor. Are they going to author a lot of the knowledge directly, edit what others have created, or merely review the knowledge prior to publication? Will they be massaging and manipulating the knowledge articles/objects for later AI tool consumption and processing? Will they be getting deep into taxonomy, tagging, etc ? Writing down all the duties and estimating how many hours per week for each task can be an approach to sizing this up.
4. What size of backlog of unprocessed knowledge-related work can you tolerate? Is your knowledge changing so quickly that you can only tolerate ~1 month of work in the backlog, or is it OK if you have 6-7+ month old knowledge objects that haven't been published or updated yet? In other words, the shelf-life of the knowledge.
5. Where the knowlege management team is located is another consideration. High cost country or low cost country? Consolidated or scattered?
6. The volume of work is a big consideration. Are you dealing with 2 products or 200 products? Are the products simple or complex? How frequently are new product revisions released — are new versions coming out every month, or once every 12-18 months? These factors will drive how much new knowledge objects have to be published or older knowledge objects updated.

Roy Dockery

I would add to Neal's comment above under bullet point 3 the clear delineation between technical documentation and knowledge management. If KM is going to be consolidated across the organization, and across departments what is the expectation for technical input from the product team and does that change the structure of the technical writing team. So when it comes to creating the content that will drive knowledge management there needs to be alignment between product management and knowledge management on responsibilities.