Benefits

• Quality training impresses new hires and helps promote a favorable corporate image
• The company’s knowledge base survives, even when key, long-time employees depart
• Costly maintenance of extraneous, inconsistent materials is no longer necessary

Challenge

Over a period of about 20 years, a large student-loan organization developed several mainframe applications to assist it in guaranteeing student loans for the federal government.

Attempts were made without success to provide employees with documentation about these systems and their role in the workflow. Previous efforts failed because the material was prepared to supplement one-on-one, on-the-job training, which relied on the availability of a knowledgeable resource. Because of the company's success rate in curing overdue loans, it experienced a rapid increase in business over a relatively short time. This success entailed the opening of new offices in remote locations and a large influx of new employees who would soon require consistent training and reference material.

Clearly, this organization was in a knowledge-transfer crisis.

Stratagem's Solution

Stratagem introduced an organized methodology for identifying and capturing corporate knowledge. Our analysts classified both the off-line and on-line processes, documented them, diagrammed the workflows, and found ways to improve the efficiency of operations.

The Stratagem team distinguished the types of documentation needed for each audience identified, eliminated redundancies and superfluous detail, and developed prototypes for the client's approval.

In addition to capturing the knowledge, Stratage developed and adhered to strict design standards for storing and retrieving the content. This enabled the client to change editing tools and output formats quickly and easily from papaer to on-line and eventually Web-based formats.

Result

As the student-loan organization tripled in size in just two years, Stratagem helped it preserve its core knowledge and made that information accessible to new employees. Stratagem was able to enhance this knowledge by making it pertinent to the employees who used it. This reduced internal training time.

A valuable asset – the organization’s core knowledge – was preserved, helping the organization grow.