Organizations are growing quickly. mergers, acquisitions and attrition are just some of the challenges to overcome when trying to maintain a knowledgeable workforce.

Companies battle everyday to maximize the capture of tacit and explicit knowledge from their employees and have come up with a number of ways to do so. Collaboration tools, knowledge maps , communities of practice, content management tools, after-action reviews and lessons learned sessions are just some of the methods organizations have devised to counter knowledge attrition.

No single approach however is enough to ensure that knowledge is retained, a mix and match of approaches is required. Though the bottom line is this, unless an organization’s culture is geared towards sharing knowledge, creating systems and processes to enable the sharing of knowledge is a moot point.

These approaches can be followed within the a project as well and become essential tools you , as a project manager, can use to your advantage in running a successful project.

The After-Action review : This is a strategy that has been adopted from the military. Often after an engagement the team will sit down together and go over what occurred, analyzing strengths and weakness. This is an excellent feedback mechanism to promote learning within the team. On a large scale, trends and patterns can be observed by comparing multiple groups, allowing best practices and lessons learned to be replicated across teams.

Communities of Practice: Is one of the simplest ways of connecting people who need knowledge with the groups that have it. Communities of practice are an excellent way to collect and disseminate information to a large audience. In order to maximize the use of a CoP a careful balance of leadership and freedom needs to be given to the community to promote sharing of ideas and knowledge, as a lack of leadership or direction could seriously damage the usefulness of the CoP in the long run.

Expert Directories : Another great way to tap into the tacit knowledge that exists in the organization - the expert directories is a method by which people can interact directly with people considered Subject Matter Experts ( SME’s ) . This however requires voluntary participation by the experts as it requires them to devote time from their busy schedules to address questions that do not benefit them directly.

Information Repositories : The simplest method of extracting and storing explicit information is the information repository. In its most basic form is a large folder with information stored in some sort of a structure. Advanced information repositories or content management systems use meta-tags and taxonomy structures to organize information for the end user in such a way as to provide the maximum value. By creating processes around the system, organization can ensure that all explicit information find’s a place somewhere in the application. It also acts as a medium for the transition of tacit knowledge to explicit.

These are just some of the methods that you could use to promote knowledge sharing and transfer in your organization or project. Keep in mind however that true knowledge retention is a daunting task and unless you have a clear approach mapped out it could lead to some serious complications.

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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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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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Doing things better and in less time seems to be a standard requirement of most clients in long term maintenance engagements.

The thought process here is - you’ve spent the past year figuring out what we do and how we do it so now you need to to it little bit better - and this story continue year in and year out.

So while the organization at large agrees to this in principle ( i.e: the wordy contracts and service level agreements ) its’ up the Project Manager to actually make good on this promise.

The challenge now is to fine tune existing processes and this is where your team comes in. The more heads you put together to figure out a better way of doing things the better your results are going to be ( well most of the time anyway ).

In one such project they set up something called the innovation challenge. Here, employees were asked to suggest process changes that could improve the efficiency of the system and in some extreme cases suggest which processes could be retired.

This serves two purposes, your team can now speak up about changes they feel need to be made or archaic and impractical process that need to be done away with, and the fact that if their change is accepted they get the recognition of helping to achieve a few goals.

You can do this both informally or formally, you might need to put together a panel that evaluates these suggestions before any of them are put into place. Let’s face it, changing an organization process is not the simplest thing to do!

The benefits of doing this correctly:

• Improvement to the processes within the project and hopefully within the organization as well
• Will lead to meeting and in some cases exceeding the service level agreements in the project
• An increased understanding of the process in the organization by your team.
• Motivation by your team as they are contributing to something larger than the project and the recognition that comes with getting it right.
• Appreciation from the client.

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Successfully managing enterprise knowledge yields big dividends. The 2008 Global MAKE Winners trading on the NYSE/NASDAQ showed a Total Return to Shareholders (TRS) for the ten-year period 1997-2007 of 16.3% – over twice the average Fortune 500 company median.

Some of the findings that the report threw up:

•     By the year 2012, there will be 3-5 global companies in each of the major business sectors. Consolidation is rapidly occurring in the automotive, computer, consulting, defense, energy, information technology, Internet, media and pharmaceutical sectors. Those companies with strong knowledge-driven strategies are most likely to survive and prosper.
•     The capability to innovate and manage enterprise intellectual capital are seen as the competitive advantages across a wide range of business sectors.
•     Asian knowledge-driven organizations now are competing on an equal knowledge ‘footing’ with their European and North American counterparts.
•     A growing number of organizations are taking on ‘Global’ characteristics – especially consulting and professional services firms, financial services, energy and media companies.  These ‘Global’ organizations tend to operate as ‘independent’ companies within a Federal structure and without the traditional corporate head office.

- 2008, MAKE Awards

The executive summary reports that you can download are:

• The 2008 Global MAKE Executive Summary
• The 2008 Asia MAKE Executive Summary
• The 2008 Japan MAKE Executive Summary
• The 2008 India MAKE Executive Summary
• The 2008 Europe MAKE Executive Summary
• The 2008 North America MAKE Executive Summary

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One of most difficult questions I’ve had to answer with respect to the subject of Knowledge Management is why Technology is so important.

The people asking these questions do not confuse Knowledge Management with Content Management ( as a lot of people very often do ). More often than not they do understand what KM is about and what it could potentially achieve.

So what is the answer? Is technology really that important to KM?

I tried drawing a correlation between the various KM initiatives I’ve been a part of over the years and whether technology did play an important role in it. The results were pretty startling, in over 80% of the initiatives technology did play a vital role. The most common role being the ability to bridge the huge geographical divide that comes with the day to day runnings of a Multi-national corporation.

As I’ve stated in many of my previous posts Knowledge Management is very simply creating channels of communications ( in essence, getting people to talk to one another ). With the breadth of communication enablers that we have at our disposal today its no wonder KM has started relying heavily on technology.

Lets not forget another valuable contribution of technology to the implementation of KM in an organization. The ability to derive metrics! a necessary task for those of us battling with the leadership teams for funds. As with all companies success speaks volumes when it is in the form of a verifiable number. KM is held to the same level of accountablility as any other function. You need to know where and how KM helped achieve a particular organization goal.

Bottom line…. For KM to survive in todays organization a technology framework is vital.

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