Piloting my way to the Gulf....

It’s been a while.  Too long, in fact…

Since I last blogged I have started a new job as a Knowledge Management (KM) Specialist at a large utility organisation.  I began in May and have 2 main roles:

• To provide KM input and advice to senior managers and others running various initiatives
• To help introduce new KM capabilities and improve existing ones

To support this latter role, we are running a complementary initiative, which is taking up the majority of my time at present – namely, the planning and execution of KM pilot projects.  

The aim of KM pilot projects is to generate quick value, win senior management support and maintain momentum for longer-term capability development.  They are also valuable KM training opportunities and will teach us what kind of KM will work in our organisation, and what won't.

What does 'quick value' mean?  Simply put, it's about achieving one or more of the following benefits:

• Working faster
• Working more cheaply
• Working more safely
• Working better

Focusing primarily on the core, technical divisions, we have run a series of exploratory workshops with management teams, to understand their work and identify any challenges or opportunities where KM interventions could help.

This produced a shortlist of potential pilot projects, which we then assessed against a set of criteria, including:

• Impact
• Senior management support
• Feasibility
• Transferability of knowledge

This enables us to prioritise and sequence the pilots, and then allocate one each to different KM department colleagues for planning and execution. 

We have identified the training requirements and divided these up amongst ourselves, with each colleague researching, and preparing training material on, a different topic.  These training modules include:

• Introduction to KM pilot projects
• Knowledge capture
• Knowledge organisation & synthesis
• Knowledge transfer
• Access & retrieval
• Performance management

We will deliver this training to ourselves, offer one another feedback, then revise and improve the materials.  Then we will train the relevant Divisional colleagues who will be involved on each pilot, including both Knowledge Champions and those from the business teams within the pilot scope.

The plan is for us to begin the first pilot project together, then for others to follow on a rolling basis, with each department colleague peeling off to initiate and run their own pilot project in turn.  The idea is that after 18 months or so, we will have completed 5 or 6 pilots in the core divisions and the KM skill and experience levels will be greatly improved.

I will update on our progress over the coming months.  Obviously I won’t share confidential details but am happy to discuss what I’m learning as we go along – what is working and why, as well as what isn’t and what we are doing about it.

In the next blog post, I'll explore some of the potential pilots in detail, and explain what a KM response might look like.