Most manufacturers know they have undocumented knowledge at risk. The harder problem is deciding where to start.
“Attempting to capture everything at once is not a strategy; it is a way of ensuring the most critical knowledge never receives the focused attention it requires.
The Critical Knowledge Prioritization Assessment™ is a structured 4-step exercise that gives manufacturing leaders a ranked picture of where undocumented knowledge is, how much risk each area carries, and which areas demand immediate action versus planned effort.
Step 1: Build the Knowledge Area Candidate List
The starting point is not a software system or an HR report. It is a conversation with operational leaders and subject matter experts. These are the people who can identify:
- Where deep expertise is concentrated in one or two individuals
- Where documentation is absent or outdated
- Where workforce changes are creating near-term exposure
APQC research on supply chain knowledge management confirms that operational leaders are the most reliable source of input on which knowledge areas are critical to operational continuity. Their input is most useful when it is structured.
Ask the leaders to identify knowledge areas, not individual employees. The goal is a working list of undocumented knowledge areas that are candidates for prioritization, not an exhaustive inventory of everything the manufacturer does not yet have on paper. A focused list of 10 to 15 knowledge areas is more productive than an open-ended catalog.
In addition to leadership input, determine knowledge needs from the shop floor. Employees who perform critical processes daily are often the first to recognize where knowledge is thin or held by a single person.
Structured interviews, brief surveys, or existing communities of practice can provide this crucial input and ensure the knowledge area candidate list (candidate list) reflects operational reality, not just what leadership assumes is at risk.
Step 2: Evaluate Each Knowledge Area on Two Dimensions
With the candidate list in hand, evaluate each knowledge area along two dimensions or components.
- Operational criticality: How severely would production, quality, or safety be affected if this knowledge were lost?
- Departure risk: How likely is it that this knowledge would be lost in the near term, based on what is known about the person who holds it?
These two components work together and must be considered as a pair.
- High criticality with low departure risk signals a planned effort that can be built into existing workflows.
- High departure risk with low criticality is a simpler task that does not require the same level of resource investment.
- The combination of high criticality and high departure risk is where immediate action is warranted. For instance, a technician who is the only person able to set up a legacy press and plans to retire in two months is not a project for next quarter.
“Involve more than one voice in this evaluation. A single manager’s assessment of criticality may not reflect what the floor depends on. Where there is disagreement about how to rate a knowledge area, that disagreement itself is useful information. It often points to knowledge that is more specialized or more siloed than leadership realized.
Step 3: Rank and Assign
With each knowledge area evaluated on operational criticality and departure risk, rank the full list and assign each item to one of two tracks:
- Immediate action
- Planned effort
Immediate action applies where both criticality and departure risk are elevated.
Planned effort covers knowledge that is important, but where sufficient time is available to build capture into performance conversations, documentation cycles, or project stage gates.
“This step produces something most manufacturers do not have: a defensible, ranked list to justify how capture resources are allocated. It converts a general awareness of risk into a concrete starting point and provides the documentation needed to make the internal case for dedicating time and attention to knowledge capture, which is often a harder conversation than the capture itself.
Step 4: Treat the Assessment as a Living Tool
“A Critical Knowledge Prioritization Assessment™ completed once and filed is not a management tool. Knowledge risk changes as the workforce changes, as production lines evolve, and as the manufacturer takes on new processes or products.
“Building a review of the assessment into an existing planning cycle, whether quarterly or at defined operational milestones, ensures that the picture stays current and that new exposures are caught before they become urgent.
Some manufacturers may integrate this review into their succession planning conversations. Others might tie it to project stage gates, requiring teams to identify knowledge transfer needs before a project closes. The specific mechanism matters less than the discipline of returning to the assessment regularly and updating it when conditions change.
Knowing which knowledge to capture is one part of the equation. Knowing how to extract and document it effectively from the people who hold it is the other.
Next Time …
The next post walks through a structured method for extracting and documenting critical knowledge directly from the shop floor.
Resources
- APQC. (2024). Identifying critical supply chain knowledge. APQC. Retrieved June 27, 2026, https://www.apqc.org/
- Liebowitz, J., & Megbolugbe, I. (2003). A set of frameworks to aid the project manager in conceptualizing and implementing knowledge management initiatives. International Journal of Project Management, 21(3), 189-198. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0263-7863(02)00093-5
- Pfeffer, J., & Sutton, R. I. (2000). The knowing-doing gap: How smart companies turn knowledge into action. Harvard Business School Press.