How big is a KM team?

How big is the average Knowledge Management team? The answer depends on a) how big your organisation is, and b) what you mean by average.

One of the questions we asked in our 2015 global survey of Knowledge Management concerned the size of Knowledge Management teams (the core teams responsible for Knowledge Management in the respondents company, or the division of the company for which they were answering).

The upper figure here shows the frequency of responses. KM team size varies considerably, with a modal size of 4 members, and a mean of 9.  However this figure represents answers from both small and large companies.

The lower figure shows the average KM team size for each organisational size range.  Although KM team size depends on organisational size, this is not a linear relationship. Increasing the organisational size by 10 does not result in a ten-fold increase in KM team size.

The overall average KM team size represents 1 KM team member per 4000 staff, and the median KM team represents 1 KM team member per 500 staff, but it makes more sense for you to read off your organisational size, and take the average KM team size from the lower graph.

The non-linear relationship represents an economy of scale. There are many tasks in common for a KM team size irrespective of the size of the company; creating the KM strategy, designing the KM Framework, piloting the KM framework etc. The main difference in scale comes when the framework is rolled out, during the implementation stage. It takes more people to roll out KM across a large organisation, but it also takes longer.

I have published a previous blog post about the 5 main skillsets for a Knowledge Management team.

Does this graph fit your own KM team size? Let me know via the comments section.