Is there a way to ensure that Best Practices are identified for re-use at the beginning of a project? Not to mention following through with this idea across the entire length of a projects life?

We all know that in medium / large IT organizations there are a lot of changes made to the project delivery approach depending  on a variety of factors ( new environment, client request, new ideas, crunched timelines, etc ).  Invariably during the course of this change people stumble across newer and more efficient ways of doing work that deliver higher value.

So the question really is how do we capture these best practices and make them readily available to the next set of people trying to start a new project?

This is a great way of creating a process that allows new project members to bring themselves up to speed with the current project.

What is also important to understand is that capturing best practices alone, while effective, is not the best way to ensure the value spreading through your organization. Capturing critical resource information is just as important, which means once you’ve identified a resource you can update your best practices records to indicate who the “go-to” person for an identified best practice or lesson learnt is. This will start dialogue between people and drive knowledge sharing.

Over time you will see a steady shift as more and more people start using this as a platform to do a quick “read” before getting started with a project.

Stumbling Blocks:

You need to figure out creative ways of getting project members to translate the experiences they have gained into best practices. There is an effort to this, however you need to judge whether this investment in time is justified in the long run for your organization.

Benefits  of doing it correctly :

This will enable to achieve detailed task in projects faster, and also ensure quality in those tasks, as it reduces rework effort, and brings in consistency in work across different members.

Eventually it should help achieve better productivity, and lower defect density both at in process, and post delivery stage.

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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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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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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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I came across another interesting article on the Google Blog that allows you to harness the power of Google Analytics.

Would you believe me if I said you don’t need a Ph.D. to understand your website data? No? Believe it. Free tools like Google Analytics can help simplify website data so that you can better understand what visitors are doing when they arrive on your site.

One of the coolest innovations in understanding your website has been to provide delightful metrics on your web data so that you can make direct changes to your site. In lesson one of our series on The Power of Measurement, we will learn about bounce rate and how understanding it can improve your website.

You may be used to reading about how many “hits” a site or a page has received. But reporting a “hit” meant something back in 1985 when it was essentially a pageview (the number of times your webpage was viewed). Today, you will find that each web page gets many “hits,” rendering the metric meaningless. While the number of “hits” a page received used to be the best measure of success, we now have more in-depth and detailed metrics to analyze the performance of our web pages.

Bounce rate is insightful because from the perspective of a website visitor, it measures this phenomenon: “I came; I puked; I left.” (OK, technically it also means the number of sessions with just one pageview.) While metrics like visitors show the number of people who came to your site, bounce rate will tell you how many of those people were unimpressed and left your site without taking any action (not even dignifying the site with a single click!).

Bounce rate has these attributes:
1) It is really hard to misunderstand. It measures the number of people who landed on your site and refused to give you even one single click!
2) It is available in most web analytics tools, including our own Google Analytics.
3) It is quick and easy to use. Bounce rate will help you understand where and how to make changes on your website in under an hour.

Read the full article here.

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Entrepreneurs are having a really tough time finding angel investors due to the tough economic conditions. The very same investors who poured money in the last year have decided to stay out of the ring because of how badly some of them got burned.

Angel investors are people who put in small sums of money usual less that $ 1 million into start ups. These are seen as critical infusions of capital when these ideas are just forming.

The biggest fallout of this would obviously be a large number of great ideas not being able to make it to the plate.

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For those of you who would like to get involved and start discussion topics that interest you on Gridlock, please feel free to do so. Membership is free - you can sign up here.

In order to spread the word on Gridlock and get in touch with more people interested in the field of KM I have setup a MyBloglog account, if you are a member do join the Gridlock community.

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Those of you who’ve been reading Gridlock for a while know, i rather recently setup a forum to allow people to start discussions with one another on topics they find interesting.

Gridlock - The forum, is run on a tool called Vanilla. It has a very small foot print and will definitely be useful for those of you who would like to start your own discussion forums. I will be writing a review on this application shortly.

“Vanilla is an open-source, standards-compliant, multi-lingual, fully extensible discussion forum for the web. Anyone who has web-space that meets the requirements can download and use Vanilla for free!”

For those of you who would like to get involved and start discussion topics that interest you on Gridlock, please feel free to do so. Membership is free - you can sign up here.

In order to spread the word on Gridlock and get in touch with more people interested in the field of KM I have setup a MyBloglog account, if you are a member do join the Gridlock community.

Once again, a big thank you to the folks who’ve taken time to send in e-mails and comments on the posts here.

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