“Talk to paula and peter—They are experienced” the experience engine in a nutshell

Abstract

People working in the Software Engineering field must solve problems every day to get their work done. For successful problem solving, they need to find others with specific experience. To help individuals with this, we created an ‘Experience Broker’ role in the organization. The broker must be officially recognized, and function as a facilitator for the internal human network in the organization. Our approach to the ‘Experience Factory’, what we call the ‘Experience Engine’, focuses on mediating referrals to sources holding the correct expertise—usually human sources. We claim that the most valuable experience is tacit and stored on the individual level. The most valuable experience transfer comes while on the job when the person holding the experience verbally relates to the learner directly. Getting the right context for this experience transfer is difficult without direct contact between the person with the experience and the recipient. Experience is transferred at the right time when the learner is actually working on something that concerns it. Values must be rooted in the organization, where individuals are willing to spend the necessary (most often short) time to spread valuable experiences to others in the organization. Our pilot project showed that a measurement and database approach is less valuable than individual face-to-face meetings, to transfer experience.