Now that you’ve understood how you can use blogs as part of your knowledge management strategy there is a need to educate your project team on how best they can develop a good blog. Though from experience i can say that there is a good chance a number of them already do blog outside of the office.

For those of them who haven’t been blogging or don’t know the benefits of it you might get the following questions.

Why Blog?

Blogging has become the cornerstone of information distribution for most people around the world. It allows you to get your ideas and views out to the entire world, and in some cases lay the seed for very interesting debates.

How do i Build a successful Blog?

Well, the fundamentals are simple Content, Content, Content. Unless you have decent content on your Blog you can be sure you’ll fail even before you get started.

Visibility for the Blog

As I mentioned earlier one of the biggest drivers of getting your employees to start blogging is the idea that there exists a platform from which they can promote themselves. Which means for them to be recognized their blog needs to.  The steps mentioned below hold good for any blog and can be replicated within the context of an organization as well.

Leave Comments :

Leaving comments is part of the foundation for starting a blog community. Most bloggers would be happy to respond to your questions, only if you are sincere. Do not use comments as a way of increasing the traffic on your site, that will happen gradually. Meaningful discourse is the target here.

Trackbacks :

A trackback is a mechanism that allows bloggers to keep track of which blogs have commented on their articles and if those articles have influenced other blogs. It’s a great way to start a community and get bloggers to read each others blogs. The plus point about this is that it helps in increasing the traffic flowing to your blog, which lets face it isnt altogether a bad thing.

Tags :

Tags make it easy to navigate a blog and find what you’re looking for. Tags are category names and people can select keywords for their posts. Usually you will see keyword names on the side navigation of a blog. It is also helps the you, the blogger as it helps to organize your blog and eventually your thoughts. Creating a structured layout is very useful to your visitors as it gives them a lot more information to go through, information they might have missed if not for the tags.

The single biggest blunder bloggers can make?? Not updating your content regularly enough. This is a sure way to lose readers on your site as most users ( if they’ve decided your blog is interesting ) expect new content on a “reasonably” regular basis. So keep this in mind, losing readers are a lot easier than gaining new ones.

Now what?

Once you’ve put together your blogging strategy and educated your employees / project team on how best to develop their blog you need to start figuring out how you can start extracting content that is relevant to your business.  I have some thoughts around this and will put them down in another posts soon.

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A blog (a contraction of the term “Web log”) is a Web site, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog. - Wikipedia

Estimates have blogs growing at the rate of 20,000 every day. Now that’s quite a figure. Just imagine if you were able to tap into that vast array of blogs and extract something useful. Then imagine you could do this whenever you needed the information, would make your life a lot easier wouldn’t it?

So what makes them such marvelous information houses? well for one, it can be run by pretty much anyone, a single individual, a group or an organization. A simple layout allows people to collaborate , share presentations and other documents. It’s very well structured, allowing articles to be grouped by specific categories and to top it all of its search able. Now put a couple of hundred of these together and you get the picture.

The Blog is a platform that’s relatively easy to manage and can easily be scaled up to meet requirements of any size and the best part, most blogging software is available free of cost and even the ones that aren’t are reasonably inexpensive. Always a good angle to push when you have a tight budget.

Using these Blogs within your organization or project team is a great way to promote sharing of thoughts and ideas.

There are generally three types of Corporate Blogs:

• The CEO Blog
• The External Blog
• The Internal Blog

CEO Blogs

CEO Blogs have been gaining popularity for a while now as it becomes a medium for employees and people outside the company to connect with the leadership.

External Blogs

External blogs allow corporates to communicate with their employees, clients and vendors. Putting a human face to the company unlike the memo’s that every corporate employee receives when something of any significance ( well, most of the time ) occurs.

While external blogs are great tools for communication their primary purpose is for PR.

Internal Blogs

Blogs at the team level allow much greater collaboration than was possible before, ideas, thoughts and musing can be captured. Information that is generally lost in a large forum of ideas or that is absent from “reviewed” documentation. Simply, they are perfect tools for capturing and harnessing tacit knowledge in the organization.

It becomes a medium to allows users from different sections of the organization to connect with each other. More importantly it becomes a conduit to allow people to talk about subjects that are not part of their regular job description.

Constraints

There are of course a number of constraints when blogging within a company. The most predominant is that employees are generally a lot more careful about what they say and how they say it. Unlike a personal blog there is always an apprehension about how what they say is going to be perceived. This could act as a hurdle to many of them blogging.

Selling the Idea

The leadership team would be very interested in promoting blogging as long as you have clearly defined goals of how you are going to harness the knowledge.

You might try talking to employees about the advantages of having a platform they can use to share their ideas and be recognized. A blog becomes a powerful tool to market themselves.

So, if you’re company hasnt started using blogs you might want to broach the topic to them. Start small, stay internal till you come up with a blogging strategy to maximize the effectiveness of the message and you might just surprise yourself.

If you’ve experimented with Blogging within your project or organization do leave a comment on what your experiences were.

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I presume that a number of us agree that Knowledge Management is a necessity when running a project. This might be a formal process ( like a knowledge management initiative) or something that has, over time,  become an ingrained part of your project management approach.

During the course of a long running ( generally support / maintenance )  project there is a good chance that you will see team members leave and new people come on board. Whether by accident or design.

Great pressure is put on projects to ensure that they start delivering more value with less cost year on year. So how do you do this? Traditionally you figure out a way of delivering the same quality of work using a resource with less experience ( i.e : cost saving ). This would involve rotating your resources to ensure that your project expenses stay under control.

This is where an induction plan becomes very important.

In order to effectively manage the induction of every new member while ensuring that the time and effort spent in doing so is kept under control a well documented, and managed , induction training plan is necessary.

When the project is first started there is a lot of effort put into planning and executing a well orchestrated knowledge transfer, that way when you finally take over the work from your client you encounter as few hiccups as possible. Unfortunately this focus is generally lost after the project starts running properly and in a number of cases new team members are not given the same quality knowledge transition that the original people experienced. Needless to say this causes a lot of problems, including a gradual reduction in your service quality.

Using a simple document to map out ( day by day ) what a new team member is supposed to learn will allow you to keep track of how he / she is progressing and to ensure that every element of the transition process is covered.

Benefits of doing this correctly :

1. Increased service levels on a sustained basis
2. Reduces lead time for a new resource to be effective
3. Ability to track training progress and make changes as necessary
4. Increased client satisfaction
5. Creating a knowledge base that can be grown over time.

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The Project Portal has become an integral part of the project team’s work model, and while some projects do rely on internal shared drives to host information ( essentially code and documentation ) there is a strong case to move content to a platform that promotes collaboration.

The need to make this transition is stronger when you have a large team that is distributed across the globe.  With the large volumes of documentation that a project generates over its life it’s imperative that data sanctity is kept.

Why do we need to do this?

Well, a portal that’s accessible to teams across the globe allows them to interact with one another and increase synergy levels.

1. Becomes a quick reference for important documents and reduces confusion when multiple versions of the same document exists in different places.
2. Promotes interaction between team members across geographies and acts as a content guide for future issues.
3. Reduces learning time by promoting sharing online and improving productivity by reducing time required to identify relevant content and experts.
4. Can be used as a platform to communicate with team members regarding issues related to the project / company and client.

What should a project portal have?

There are a number of features that could find it’s way to a project portal, including:

• Project Announcements
• Client Information / News from the Client / Client Appreciation
• Contact Information of the PM, Tech Leads, Key Resources
• Calendar
• Tracking of Tasks and Issues
• A Resource Management Section
• Document Libraries for project artifacts
• Best Practices / Lessons Learned
• Discussion Forums
• The Project Wiki

Project Office.net has a great tool that allows you to perform a number of activities that are required during the execution of a project. In future posts we will do a walk through of the product and understand how its various features can be put to good use.

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Managing customer expectations is a very challenging job that requires constant attention. However, just as important is keeping track of all the customer complaints that are raised and what was done to address them. Over time this is a great way of understanding what went right / wrong with the project.

While there are a number of companies out there that have a defined process in place to capture and address customer complaints there are instances where information falls through the cracks. So it becomes the onus of the project manager to ensure that a record is kept of all such interactions ( both good and bad ).

To Automate or Not?

Another question you need to ask yourself is whether it would make sense to automate a process that captures and keeps track of customer complaints.  The idea is to track, step by step, the escalation route a customer complaint takes when entered into the system.

I do understand this is a question that should be directed to the team handling process automation within the organization instead of project managers, however being the end users of such a system it would be interesting to understand what you think of it.

Now lets presume you agree, and that you have a system up and running, how do you think this information should be handled?

Being confidential in nature you might want to consider closing off access to only allow certain people within your team from interacting with this system.  Senior Managers and group heads can then pull out reports that could give them an idea of how well / or badly a customer’s perception of the project is and can be invaluable in providing early warnings of when a projects starts to fail.

What are the Benefits of putting such a system / tool in place?

• Greater control over the format of complaints coming in
• Ability to track how complaints are being handled and the escalation routes being taken
• Provide early warning signals to senior managers
• Ability to understand what went wrong / right with the project.
• Transparent communication / Improving client relations

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As a Project Manager you are expected to know the strengths and weakness of the people in your team. While this is great in theory it generally takes a while before you gain a fairly good understanding of these skills and where best to use them ( unless of course you’ve worked with the very same team members before ).

This is of course challenging when you are in charge of a fairly large project, here you would probably bestow this responsibility on your project leads in the hope that they will have a better understanding of the skills of the team members.

I”m sure we all agree that is an unstated expectation to running  a successful project, it will allow you to speed up reaction times and ensure that the right people are chosen for specific tasks thereby saving you a lot of stress when the going gets tough.

While most organizations do mandate that their employees update their skills fairly regularly this is a practice that is for the most part overlooked.by the average employee. So it might make sense for you to create a small database ( this could be an excel ) which allows you to keep track of your teams skills.

The Benefits of implementing such a system are self evident:

• Ability to keep track of the skills of various team members
• Faster reaction time in case of project emergencies
• Ability to leverage team members better
• Perform a skill check for the team as a whole
• Create individual development plans for team members

This list needs to be updated at least once every quarter, to ensure the skills are current. While this is a tedious and time consuming task it is necessary for the long term success of the project.  in extreme cases make it a mandate for your team to update this with their information. Just keep in mind that the sheet should capture only information essential to you ( technical / functional knowledge , soft skills , etc ).

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If you’ve ever worked on an Application Maintenance project you know the need to have a well structured Application Knowledge Base. In most cases these systems form the corner stone of the engagement.

How would a system like this work?

Well, the basic idea is of course to create a platform that will allow your team members to look up solutions for issues as they come in. Only if they do not find a solution here would they spend time trying to resolve it.

It’s equally important for them to input new solutions into the system so that future users can benefit from it.

The Benefits of having a system like this in place are numerous:

• Create a knowledge base around the application that can be used over and over again
• Reducing the turnaround time for issue resolution
• Decreasing the time it takes for a new member of the team to bring himself up to speed with issue resolution.
• Improving client satisfaction
• Decreasing the dependency on certain key team members

While I’ve talked about this subject before, this post is more to get an understanding from the readers of this blog whether such a tool is really important, and if it is how have you used this in projects successfully?

There are a number of tools out there that do exactly what I’ve described above and if you’ve come across a particularly good one do leave a comment.

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In a previous post i talked about how useful a Wiki is within a project and how opening up a wiki and expecting team members to use it productively will probably not give you the best results.

Once you figured out which wiki tool to leverage ( if any ) and have rolled it out within your project the next big challenge is to promote its use.

Some considerations:

• Well, the biggest step to overcome is the inertia. Users seldom want to contribute when they see a completely blank space. Start putting up some of your own content and talk to a few of your team members to help build it into something substantial that you can then showcase to the rest of your team.
• Please keep in mind that being a corporate wiki every contribution made to it is tracked, there is no such thing as anonymity. Once you get over this hurdle you can leverage the fact that it is a great way to promote an individual as a knowledge creator.
• Don’t put too many rules and structures in place at the beginning, this is a sure way to derail the entire process. Allow your team the flexibility to grow the wiki the way they want it to. If you feel at any point that it is getting unmanageable you can always step in.
• The Wiki should be the first place your team looks for information, which means do not keep copies of this information sitting around in other places.
• Don’t expect an immediate return - A wiki takes time to grow.
• Educate your team - Take them through the entire process of creating an article on the wiki so they understand how it works. Do not make the mistake of assuming that just because everyone has seen Wikipedia they know how to use a wiki.
• Allow people to make mistakes and deviate from the “norm” - This is a creative process that will take some time to evolve, encourage a level of experimentation and allow your team to make mistakes. That is the only way they will learn how to use this effectively.
• Promote the wiki whenever you can

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