DDBA 8581 Week 7 Knowledge Transfer Plan Example

Eighteen Months to Move What the Scheduler Knows: A Knowledge Transfer Plan Deciding Item by Item Whether Each Capability Travels by Document or by Working Alongside, Naming Two Recipients So the Knowledge Does Not Simply Relocate Its Single Point of Failure

Student Name

Walden University

DDBA 8581: Succession Planning: A Survival Tool of the Fittest

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Eighteen Months to Move What the Scheduler Knows: A Knowledge Transfer Plan Deciding Item by Item Whether Each Capability Travels by Document or by Working Alongside, Naming Two Recipients So the Knowledge Does Not Simply Relocate Its Single Point of Failure

The Departure

The Reactor 2 scheduler profiled in Week 2 has told the plant manager of a planned retirement in eighteen months. The Week 3 inventory identified eight critical capabilities: three writable, three showable and two relational. This plan routes each one either through codification, a procedure or annotated record a colleague could follow, or through personalization, joint work, shadowing or supervised practice in which the capability passes from person to person.

The Transfer Schedule

[after]

Every item has a second recipient, so the plan does not move the single point of failure from the incumbent to the junior scheduler.

Table 1

Transfer Routes, Recipients and Timing

Close Calls

Reactor 2 sequencing could be fully codified as rules, but the rules have exceptions the incumbent applies from experience, so it starts as codification and finishes as supervised practice. Turnaround builds happen twice a year, which means the recipient will see only two or three before the incumbent leaves; the plan therefore codifies the last six builds' spreadsheets and decisions, so the recipient has precedents to study between turnarounds.

Barriers

Szulanski (1996) studied the internal transfer of practices within firms and found that the biggest obstacles were not reluctance on either side but features of the knowledge and the people: a recipient without the background to absorb what is offered, uncertainty about why a practice succeeds even among those who use it, and a strained or distant relationship between the parties. Each appears here. The junior scheduler has two years' experience, so absorptive capacity is limited for the turnaround builds; that item starts last. The yield drift judgment is causally ambiguous even to the incumbent, who cannot fully say what cues are being watched; personalization with a match criterion addresses it. The relationship between the incumbent and the smaller plant's scheduler is distant; the plan schedules monthly joint reviews to build it.

Nonaka (1994) argued that tacit knowledge moves through socialization, shared experience in which the learner absorbs skill by working alongside, and the personalization items follow that logic. Hansen (1999) found that complex knowledge transfers better through strong ties than weak ones, which supports the plan's insistence on frequent contact over occasional handovers.

Overlap Time Is the Cost

Personalization costs overlap: the incumbent spends roughly a day a week on transfer for fifteen months. The plan accepts that cost because the alternative is losing showable and relational capabilities entirely.

How the Plan Will Be Checked

Each item's completion test is observable, so the plant manager can review progress monthly. The yield drift item has the most demanding test: the recipient's calls must match the incumbent's on ten consecutive cases, which may take several months to accumulate. If the recipient's calls diverge, the incumbent explains the difference, and the case is logged as a training example. The supplier item is complete only when vendors call the recipient directly without being prompted, a test the plan cannot force but can observe.

Documenting the Codified Items

Codified items will be stored in the plant's document system with an owner and a review date, so they do not decay into another set of private files.

Limits

The schedule assumes the incumbent stays the full eighteen months and cooperates fully.

References

Hansen, M. T. (1999). The search-transfer problem: The role of weak ties in sharing knowledge across organization subunits. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(1), 82-111. https://doi.org/10.2307/2667032

Nonaka, I. (1994). A dynamic theory of organizational knowledge creation. Organization Science, 5(1), 14-37. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.5.1.14

Szulanski, G. (1996). Exploring internal stickiness: Impediments to the transfer of best practice within the firm. Strategic Management Journal, 17(S2), 27-43. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.4250171105