Using Screencasts to Share Knowledge Inside a Company

by Thibaut - October 13th, 2008

In Implementing Lean Software Development, Mary and Tom Poppendieck wrote:

Because tacit knowledge is so difficult to communicate, handoffs always result in lost knowledge; the real question is how to minimize that waste.

How to ensure we minimize that waste when we share knowledge inside a company ? One widely-used possibility is to take notes and transcript them into a wiki. Mind-mapping also works pretty well for that purpose.

There is another option though.

Recording handoffs sessions with screencasts

Because they could not be at the office at the same moment, two friends of mine (Damien and Ludovic) decided to use Camtasia Studio and a microphone to record a training on Friday so that the other could watch it on Monday and know what had to be done and how to do it.

What should have been a one-time adventure turned out to work so well that they decided to generalize this practice to their whole company.

Each time two developers are on one machine for a handoff session, they now take benefits of the situation to record the session and save the screencast into a shared folder so that everyone can access it if required.

Low-cost, high-value information sharing

Knowledge is the most valuable asset of a company, hence treating it like gold really is deserved. Here are some reasons why screencasts worked so well for Damien and Ludovic:

  • once the required software is installed, the effort required by turning it on is low (a few clicks)
  • the output of the recording is quite close from a regular handoff, hence diminishing the waste described by the Poppendieck’s
  • the output tend to be dense yet easy to grab at the same time
  • the technology is mature and easy to use

I find screencasting an appealing way of learning – no questions why PeepCode is so successful.


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