Knoco comes to Dubai!

This blog has been relatively inactive in recent weeks, for which I must apologise. 

The thing is, for the last 2 months I have been discussing and planning and re-discussing and re-planning a big knowledge management (KM) project for a client based in Dubai.

It's taken a significant amount of time and effort, not just to clarify the scope of work, but to clarify what both client and consultant think that scope of work entails.

Well, I am now deployed and approaching the end of my first week in this busy city.  I'm still busy but closer to my comfort zone than before, so will make an effort to blog here, on some of the issues I encounter and the KM solutions we propose and implement.

For now, the kind of work I'll be doing includes:

• Knowledge Management Assessment and Benchmarking - through workshops and interviews with staff from across the client organisation;
• Designing a Knowledge Management Strategy - again through workshops and interviews with the client's senior leadership team;
• Conducting a Knowledge Scan - identifying the critical knowledge areas and assessing the extent to which they are documented or within the heads of a few experts;
• Running our Learning Culture Survey - to examine people's behaviour and attitudes towards learning and collaboration;
• Designing a Knowledge Management Framework - to enable knowledge to be discussed, captured, organised and accessed in a systematic way;
• Creating an Implementation Plan - to set out the sequence in which new elements need to be introduced, at what cost, and by whom;
• Piloting and 'Quick Wins' - testing and proving concepts, to create value and build support for further implementation;
• Training - providing the KM team and others with the basic skills needed to manage knowledge, such as interviewing, facilitating, and structuring knowledge.

So, I will be a bit busy!  But, as they say, if you want to get something done, give it to someone that's busy, and I would very much like to hear from anyone interested in KM, either for an informal chat or to explore ways in which Knoco can help ease their pain....

I'll be in Dubai until the end of September and if anyone would like a conversation about knowledge management - either out here or anywhere in the world! - please contact me direct, or via the Knoco website.

How in the world do you do KM?

Hot off the press, the Knoco 2017 Global KM survey is now available!

The survey revisited the topics first surveyed in 2014, such as:

• Reasons for doing KM
• Maturity levels
• KM scope
• Challenges
• KM skills
• Implementation and governance
• Value created
• KM budgets
• Technology
• KM processes
• Best practices
• Lesson learning
• Culture
• Communities of Practice

In 2014, we had over 200 responses - this time the number surpassed 400!

For a copy of the survey results, please contact me direct or via the Knoco website. 

Get together with fellow KMers now and then - it's inspiring!

For a few days last week, I swapped Wiltshire’s winding lanes for San Francisco’s frantic streets.  I’d been invited to speak at KA Connect – a Knowledge Management (KM) conference for the AEC industry (i.e. Architecture, Engineering and Construction).  More about my involvement in a future blog post….

The conference was attended by a little over 220 people, drawn from the 3 sectors, and focused on 2 key themes:

·        Critical knowledge – i.e. how to define, capture and manage it;

·        KM strategy – i.e. how to use KM to support a firm’s commercial strategy.

In the parlance of the moment, I took a number of ‘take-aways’ from the event, some of which I’ll explore in future posts but, to summarise here:

·        After so many years of battling the yet-to-be-convinced, getting together with other people that ‘get it’ is good for one’s KM mental health!

·        Twitter enables speakers’ insights to reach the wider world within seconds which, for most people reading this blog, will always be remarkable;

·        Larry Prusak remains the Godfather of KM, and deservedly so;

·        As with military operations, so with life – prior planning prevents piss-poor performance….

More to come….

For a conversation about how managing your knowledge can help improve performance, please contactme direct, or via the Knoco website.

How can KM consultants help? Let me count the ways...

Knowledge management (KM) consultants can help their clients in several ways:

·        Helping them to understand their own KM strengths and weaknesses;

·        Identifying KM and knowledge gaps and areas for improvement, in order of priority;

·        Pinning down which knowledge topics need to be managed first (because you can’t do it all at once);

·        Designing and implementing KM frameworks, to manage the knowledge;

·        Setting up pilot projects in priority areas (because you can’t do it all at once);

·        Identifying lessons from the pilot projects and using them to adjust the KM framework before it is rolled out more widely;

·        Creating KM strategies and policies, giving senior leaders the ability to drive KM programmes forward;

·        Interviewing experts in critical knowledge areas so their know-how doesn’t leave the firm when they do;

·        Creating knowledge assets so that critical knowledge becomes available to everyone;

·        Facilitating lessons capture meetings, to help project teams learn from their experience;

·        Facilitating Peer Assists, to help new project teams learn from experienced ones;

·        Shaping and adjusting the culture from one where ‘I know this’ to one where ‘we do’.

There are plenty more, but those will do for now.
The last point, about changing the culture, is both the hardest thing to do but yet the one thing that will have the greatest effect, if done properly.
There are many tools and activities that help reveal an organisation’s culture and provide evidence that things need to change – surveys, interviews and workshops can all provide an overview of the culture.  In the next blog post, we’ll look at one to help individuals alone.
For a conversation about KM with leading management consultants in the field, please visit the Knoco website or contact me direct.

What happens when the people that took over from the people that left leave?

Had a meeting with a potential client this morning.  Part of the conversation went like this:

Rupert: One of the key benefits of Knowledge Management (KM) is the retention of what you already know, so you don't lose that knowledge when employees leave.

Client: Actually, we already have KM here - we have a strategy, a framework, a system...we've got it all.

Rupert: That's great - how's it going for you?

Client: Actually, we've had a few problems.  We had this one guy who was leading it all and then he left.  But the lady that was shadowing him, she took over and then she left also....

Rupert: Right.

For a conversation about the benefits of knowledge retention and transfer or other KM services, please get in touch.

The 10 principles behind successful KM strategy implementation

I’ve just finished reading ‘Designing a Successful KM Strategy’ by Stephanie Barnes and Nick Milton.

I’ll review it in due course but for now, thought the 10 principles listed in Chapter 4 were worth listing here:

1.      KM implementation needs to be organisation-led; tied to organisation strategy and to specific organisation issues.
2.      KM needs to be delivered where the critical knowledge lies, and where the high value decisions are made.
3.      KM implementation needs to be treated as a behaviour change programme.
4.      The endgame will be to introduce a complete management framework for KM.
5.      The framework will need to be embedded into the organisation structures.
6.      The framework will need to include governance if it is to be sustainable.
7.      The framework is to be structured, rather than emergent.
8.      KM implementation should be a staged process, with regular decision points.
9.      KM implementation should contain a piloting stage.
10.   KM implementation should be run by an implementation team, reporting to a cross-organisational steering group.

I’ll look at these in more detail in my next post.

To discuss how to design and implement a KM strategy, please get in touch or visit the Knoco website.

Designing a Successful KM Strategy - Stephanie Barnes and Nick Milton

I just got my hands on a copy of this book by my colleagues, Stephanie Barnes and Nick Milton.

I'm whizzing through it (nearly done!) and hope to have a review up on this blog within the week.

The balance between researching an academic thesis and writing a 'Dummies' Guide' is a difficult one to strike. However, this book gets it just right in my view. I am impressed by how accessible it is, with valuable insights gained from many years of work at the KM coalface.

KM sometimes gets a bad name, not entirely unfairly. However, I particularly like the way this book explains why some KM interventions fail to generate their expected value and sets out how these shortcomings can be addressed.

The over-riding message I take away from this is that this isn't a game, and deserves time, effort and, crucially, judgement on where and how KM can help a business in its wider, commercial strategy.

More to follow when I'm done!

Where are we headed? How are we going get there? - KM and strategy development

Most successful organisations develop and follow strategies. 
Opinions differ on the components needed for an effective strategy but one well-known perspective is that of the US military, for whom a strategy must cover:

·        Ends – why are we doing this?

·        Ways – how are we going to achieve our aims?

·        Means – what resources will we use?

Companies can choose any number of objectives but Knowledge management (KM) can inform both Ways and Means thus:

·        Ways

o   Increased collaboration

o   Innovation

o   Quality improvements

o   Higher productivity

o   Reduced costs

·        Means

o   KM frameworks

o   Knowledge Assets

o   Communities of Practice (CoP)

o   After Action Reviews and Retrospects

o   Peer Assists

o   Lessons Learned

o   Knowledge Retention and transfer

Knowledge management (KM) can and should inform an organisation’s strategy.  Indeed, at Knoco we believe every company should develop a KM strategy to support and enable its overall business strategy.
A KM strategy should include the following elements:

·        A vision – what will the future organisation’s use of KM look like?

·        The scope of KM – what do we mean by KM and where will it apply? (i.e. it’s not document or information management, although those are related disciplines)

·        The business drivers – why are we doing this?  Examples might include cost reduction, new product development, mergers and acquisitions, movement into new markets etc.

·        Opportunities and risks – what initiatives are underway to which KM can be aligned?  What potential threats exist?

·        The value proposition – what is the size of the prize?  How much value can be gained?

·        The critical knowledge areas – where should we start?

·        Stakeholder management – who should be part of this and how do we gain and maintain their support?

More information about Knoco’s KM strategy work can be found on the Knoco website here.