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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Branding, Branding, Branding!!

“As any marketer will tell you, A large portion of a products success depends on it’s brand value. The same holds true for a Knowledge Management initiative.

There is no doubting that you have a good product, otherwise you wouldn’t be taking it to the market ( being presumptuous here ) . However to ensure its success, you need the brand. Once people start associating KM in your organization with something prestigious the interest in it will automatically increase.

Strong KM practices can be run into the ground because of a lack of branding. Unlike most other job functions Knowledge Management has to be sold to the general public. You need to approach your employees like customers.”

Is the term Knowledge “Management” mis-leading?

“The term “Knowledge Management” can be misleading at times. When i first got into this field a couple of years ago i was a little wary of what i was supposed to accomplish. The very idea of Managing Knowledge was something i just couldn’t wrap my head around.

Today, after having practiced KM in the real world and studied it, i’ve come to understand that true KM is more environment management than actual managing of knowledge.

So what is environment management? Well, simply put, it’s creating an enviroment that fosters knowledge sharing. Attempting to actually manage knowledge is a hopeless task. This is because the very nature of KM frowns upon the use of strict guidelines and processes that most other functions require.”

Is Technology necessary for Knowledge Management?

“A large percentage of my posts so far have touched upon technology in the KM sphere. Now, while a portion of you practicing KM out there might feel that technology has no place in KM i still feel that in this day and age creating a robust technology platform that can support a KM initiative is one of the most important milestones you can set for your company.

Let me be very clear about the meaning of my statement above, technology is not Knowledge Management. As stated in earlier posts, a warped understanding of the term “Knowledge Management” have led a large number of companies to re-christen their information system initiatives under this umbrella. This aside, i do feel very strongly that unless you have a strong technology framework your KM initiative will not be as widespread as it should.

A prime example would be in the area of communications. The single biggest challenge to sharing knowledge in any organization are its barriers to communication. Once you’ve opened those up knowledge automatically starts flowing. Environment management, that’s what KM is all about.”

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If you’ve ever cooked anything, or attempted to like i have. The first thing you need to do is take a look at the recipe ( the knowledge audit ) . Once you’ve done that you need to make a list of the various ingredient ( the knowledge inventory ) . Unless you do this you might end up with something completely different from what you started out trying to accomplish.

So what is a knowledge inventory? well, as the name suggests its a kind of stock taking to identify and locate knowledge assets around the organization. This includes the explicit and the very difficult to locate tacit knowledge sources.

The best way to make a comprehensive list of knowledge sources is to segregate it by explicit and tacit knowledge.

Some of the questions you might want to ask when identifying explicit knowledge sources are :

• What explicit knowledge already exists? - categories of documents, databases, intranet libraries, links etc.
• Where this knowledge is located? - locations in the organizations and the various systems that house the information.
• Access and Organization - How is the knowledge structured and how easy of difficult is it for people to locate this information, and do they have access to it as well.
• Purpose and relevance - why does the information exist? how relevant is it to the users?
• Usage - who uses them? how often ?

Identifying tacit knowledge sources is an entirely different proposition. Unlike explicit knowledge, tacit knowledge is much more difficult to quantify. Though there are a few questions you could ask to create a rough map of where it exists.

• Who we have - The numbers and categories of people working in the organization.
• Where they are - Identifying where people are located is extremely important when building a tacit knowledge map
• What they do and what they know - job profiles, expertise areas and so on.

The above questions should give you an excellent place to start collating the list of knowledge sources you have in your organization. Once this is done you can move on to the next step of identifying the gaps after comparing this information to the information you’ve garnered from the knowledge audit.

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I know i couldn’t have chosen a more dramatic title for this post( Helps with the overall effect of the post, i hope ), i think I’ll put it down to the way I’ve being feeling the past couple of days .

Knowledge Management is a very interesting field, of that i have no doubt. There is no time to get used to what you are doing, coz before you know it something else springs up. At least that’s the way I’m used to working. So, it comes as no surprise when I’m offered a job i spend as much time as i can understanding what it entails, and , in most cases I’m horrified to say the term “Knowledge Manager” has been so abused that it barely resembles the profile most of us have in mind.

The Thin red line i refer to in the headline depicts the difference between a content manager and a knowledge manager in the industry. So, what am i trying to get at? I honestly have no idea, there isn’t a “big picture” behind this post. Just a subtle poke at the folks putting together job profiles.

One reason i feel there is such a misconception is that fact that people have difficulty coming to grips with what Knowledge Management is all about. Then trying to fit that idea into a job profile seems an even more complex task. So the easiest way out is to rename the content manager profile. Specially if the company in question wants to get on the “Knowledge Management” bandwagon.

As a direct result of this misguided attempt to bridge a perceived gap, you have content managers walking around with the title Knowledge Manager. I’m not judging the people here, its just that it makes an already muddled situation even more murky.

This isn’t something that all companies do, so don’t get all excited, but enough of them have to warrant a serious look at what goes into defining these roles.

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If you’ve been reading my posts to pass time, if nothing else, you would have come across the term “Environment Management”. Now while this term might seem more at home in an EPA handbook let me assure you the context it was used in was with respect to knowledge management.

Knowledge Management is a term that is rather vague to describe, even people who have been in the field for a while still find it difficult to describe to other people what it is they do. Speaking from personal experience, how do you tell another person that your primary job function is to manage the knowledge of other people? Better yet, how do you describe the method of actually accomplishing this vague goal?

I’ve come to understand, that attempting to manage knowledge is a hopeless task. Since a large portion of what you deal with is tacit in nature. The very idea of creating a framework to “manage” this knowledge has left me scratching my head on more than one occasion. Now, while we have come up with various ways and means of promoting knowledge management i think it’s time there was clarity around the term.

Hence, the use of the term environment management. It is much easier to explain the concept of managing the environment surrounding knowledge. The key function of a knowledge manager is to open channels of communication. Creating knowledge ( explicit and tacit ) is a by-product of this effort. So the focus has to be on managing the environment around the actual “knowledge”.

As always, thoughts and opinions around this post are most welcome…..

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As any marketer will tell you, A large portion of a products success depends on it’s brand value. The same holds true for a Knowledge Management initiative.

There is no doubting that you have a good product, otherwise you wouldn’t be taking it to the market ( being presumptuous here ) . However to ensure its success, you need the brand. Once people start associating KM in your organization with something prestigious the interest in it will automatically increase.

Strong KM practices can be run into the ground because of a lack of branding. Unlike most other job functions Knowledge Management has to be sold to the general public. You need to approach your employees like customers.

There is another reason for branding, as with most KM initiatives there is invariably a rewards and recognition program tied to it. When an employee is recognized as a knowledge contributor , the prestige is much greater when there is brand value associated with the award.

The underlying idea behind Branding is to increase awareness and promote its use, there is also the added benefit of the “wow” factor.

One of the biggest ways of doing this is to ensure that there is senior management presence in most of the award ceremonies. The idea that automatically gets conveyed by this approach is that in order to get recognized by the top brass you need to be a Knowledge Contributor.

There is a lot that needs to go into an initiative like KM, but branding is something that almost always seems to lose out…

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When i started this blog the underlying reason was that there was a huge disparity between what i’ve read about knowledge management and the way its actually implemented in most organizations.

If you ask any KM expert about whether there is a standard method of implementing KM chances are he/she would probably say there isn’t one. It entirely depends on what your goals are and how these processes are received by your audience. At the end of the day, that is what really matters. The greatest KM Framework would still flounder if there isn’t buy-in from the grass roots level.

It has always been stated that Knowledge Management is not about technology. However from what i’ve seen in most companies (these are relatively large corporates which have their people spread all over the globe) technology seems to be the backbone of the KM initiative. Unless you have a platform that allows people to extract the information they want and allow them to contribute to the system, chances are your KM strategy will not work.

This is because the average employee in the organization is so focused on his job that anything above and beyond is considered an effort. Though, dont expect people to come running just because you have built a system. There has to be a benefit to the employee, this can either be in the form of making his job easier to do, or providing an incentive for him to contribute to the system.

There are exceptions however, the whole open source community is built on a knowledge management model. The initiatives here aren’t driven by incentives - and while there were skeptics, at the end of the day these have showed us that knowledge management can sustain itself in the long run.

I’ve tried to put down the basics of KM in the form of strategies that you might want to use to create an underlying framework to tackle an initiative like this. You can read those articles here.

The bottom line is, regardless of what technology you use, at the end of the day you need to get your people the right information at the right time, with as little effort as possible.

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Over the past few posts we’ve talked about a variety of subjects, Strategies to implement KM , How to run communities of practice, the effect of blogs on KM and so on. The most common question however is not how to implement KM but when. I thought I’d put together a few thought on when you should start think of looking at a Knowledge Management initiative for your organization.

So when is your company ready to start a KM initiative? If any of the following statements are true then its probably time for just that.

• A number of people have already started exploring the benefits of implementing KM in your organization.
• Someone has a personal stake in developing KM.
• KM has emerged as a topic of interest in your organization.
• The organization has a high-level vision of pursuing and implementing KM.

Right, now you’ve figured out that its time to implement KM in your organization, but how do you go about doing it?

The only way an initiative like this is going to gain traction is if people see a clear benefit to what they are already trying to accomplish. The main aim of any Knowledge Management initiative should be to make a person’s job easier, not more difficult.

The first step is to de-mystify KM, do not use complicated terms and strategies to define what it is, rather use simple definitions and examples that provide a clear, tangible picture of what its all about.

The second step involved finding people who are really interested in pursuing KM activities. Launching an initiative amongst this group of people will most definitely ensure a much higher success rate. Recruiting well respected and influential people in your company is a very smart way to promote the value of the initiative to the rest of your organization.

The third step involved looking for opportunities to implement KM. Use groups you feel can benefit with an KM initiative. Target low hanging fruit, market any win you have with the initiative however small , as it can be used as a platform to promote other initiatives as well.

The last step involves creating a technology framework that can support the initiative. While KM is not just about technology it does form a large part of it, without the technology infrastructure it might be difficult to sustain many initiatives.

The biggest road block to any KM initiative is culture, ignoring it is the single biggest mistake many people commit while rolling out KM initiatives. Most importantly - Do NOT sell an enterprise level KM solution without the evidences to back up your initiatives.

While these are just some of the thoughts on how you get started, you will find dozens of smaller ways to improve on it once you get started. Remember, start small and work your way up.

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