Knowledge Capture, Codification, and Retention
This section covers Knowledge Capture, Codification, and Retention. The exam tests elicitation methods, conversion of tacit knowledge into usable explicit assets, codification quality, and retention through turnover, retirement, and role change.
Core rules
- Capture starts with a trigger: project close, incident review, expert retirement, merger, process change, or repeated expert request.
- Match method to knowledge type: critical incident technique for judgment, after-action review for team learning, knowledge harvesting for departing experts, observation and shadowing for skilled practice, and structured interviews for rationale.
- Codification is not transcription. A useful asset states context, decision criteria, exceptions, owner, review date, and links to related knowledge.
- Validate with a second expert and an intended user. If the user cannot act on it, the capture failed.
- Retention protects both content and capability. Identify single points of failure, cross-train, maintain succession notes, and apply retention schedules to records. Retention also covers obsolete content: stale guidance can be riskier than no guidance.
Worked example
A senior reliability engineer is retiring. A team records a two-hour interview and posts the transcript. The reasoning should flag this as weak capture: it is long, unstructured, and lacks validation. A better approach uses critical incident prompts about past failures, extracts decision heuristics into a structured guide, has a successor apply it on a live case, and assigns review ownership.
Traps
Do not confuse backup with retention. Do not publish raw transcripts as knowledge. Do not capture without a reuse owner. Do not ignore tacit judgment and social context.