Knowledge Audits – Determining your Format

If you’ve conducted an audit in the past you know the pros and cons of both a Face-to-Face audit and a questionnaire.

The questions you need to ask yourself before you start out with an audit are as follows :

1. What is the purpose of my audit?
2. Who is my target audience?
3. How large is this group?
4. Is it very diverse?
5. How much time do i have?
6. How complex do i want this to be?

I’m sure you might put together a whole host of other questions as well, but these 6 should cover the basics when deciding upon a method.

While there is no doubt that a Face to Face audit would generate a huge amount of information it also raises the question of how much time you have to spend. Setting up meetings with a large number of people, expecting them to adhere to the schedule and then filtering out the noise in a face to face meeting all take time. In most instances this is something an auditor doesn’t have the luxury of.

A Questionnaire would be a likely alternative to someone who does not have the time to spend with face to face audits.

So how do you decide between the two? Simply put, factor in what you want to achieve, and how much time you have, not to mention the size of your target group. If its simple information you want then a questionnaire is definitely the way to go, a face to face audit wouldn’t actually be very much more effective in a case like this.

Over the next few posts we shall get into more details regarding knowledge audits.

Knowledge Retention Strategies

Knowledge attrition is increasing at an extremely rapid rate as companies lose portions of their workforce, either quickly or over time. Establishing a strategy to nip this in the bud would save them millions, if not billions of dollars every year.

The greatest deterrence to knowledge attrition is a robust KM initiative . This enables existing information to circulate efficiently and thereby reducing the impact of attrition on the knowledge of the company. However, lets face it even the most robust Knowledge retention strategies cant hope to replace a lost knowledge asset.

This awareness in companies of how knowledge attrition affects then has prompted a large number of companies to institutionalize certain processes to capture as much knowledge from their employees as possible. Listed below are a few of these methods ( you might want to check if your company uses any of these strategies of retention )

1. CoP’s and internal networks
2. Interviews
3. Videotaping
4. SME directories
5. Repositories
6. After action / project milestone reviews
7. Mentoring Programs
8. Knowledge Maps
9. Recruiting Strategies
10. Retention Strategies

While a lot of these seem very useful a large percentage of companies find it difficult to measure the effectiveness they have. Knowledge transfer quality seems to be the single biggest reason why corporates shy away from establishing robust knowledge retention strategies.

Validating the quality of knowledge transfer can be very difficult so there are other ways around the problem. Identifying critical information areas and concentrating on these ensure that a higher quality of knowledge is recorded and retained instead of a “Jack of all trades – Master of none” approach.

There are a ton of research articles out there on this topic, so browse around , now that you know what to look for.

If you use any of the methods mentioned above to capture knowledge within your project do leave us a comment.

The Risk Management Plan

In many of my other posts I’ve referred to the need for identifying issues and risks and managing them on an ongoing basis. This is done through adhoc informal communication and also formally as part of the weekly status reports and weekly status meetings.

As with the Project Communications Plan, whether or not your project or your customer requires the Risk Management Plan to be an actual deliverable, you should still create the plan and orchestrate your risk mitigation activities accordingly. By creating this plan at the beginning of the project and having the customer signoff on it, you will have done three very important things to set the right tone early on:

• Created a sense of importance and urgency around risk management
• Let your team know that this is important and will be tracked
• Let your customer know that you’re on the ball as the Project Manager

The high-level items that should be covered in the Risk Management Plan are:

• Introduction
• Risk Management Planning
• Risk Identification
• Risk Analysis and Response Planning
• Risk Monitoring and Control
• Review/Approval

Introduction

This is merely a high-level description of what the document covers. For the purpose of Risk Management, I usually just put the definition in here to show understanding – something like this:

“Risk management is the systematic process of identifying, analyzing, and responding to project risk. It includes maximizing the probability and consequences of positive events and minimizing the probability and consequences of adverse events to project objectives.”

Risk Management Planning

In this section we describe what is involved in planning for risk management for the project. Describe how meetings are going to take place to brainstorm on risk management and prioritizing the risks that are identified for ongoing tracking.

Risk Identification

Risk identification involves determining which risks might affect the project and documenting their characteristics. This section should identify the participants in the risk identification process. This is usually going to be the entire delivery team led by the Project Manager, and the customer-side team led by the project sponsor.

It should be noted here that risk identification is an iterative process. Several cuts will be taken by the teams or subsets thereof at the beginning of the project, but the risks list will also be reviewed and revised throughout the project.

Risk Analysis and Response Planning

Risk analysis is the process of assessing the impact and likelihood of the identified risks. Identify in this section how the risks will be analyzed and prioritized. Risk analysis requires that the probability and consequences of the risks be evaluated using established analysis methods and processes and those methods and processes need to be defined and described here in as much detail as possible.

Risk response planning is the process of developing options and determining actions to enhance opportunities and reduce threats to the project’s objectives. In other words, identifying ways to mitigate the identified risks as much as possible should they actually occur. The effectiveness of response planning can actually directly determine whether certain risks increase or decrease for the duration of the project. Risk response planning must be appropriate to the severity of the risk, cost effective in meeting the challenge, timely to be successful, realistic within the project context, agreed upon by all parties involved, and owned by an assigned person

Risk Monitoring and Control

Risk monitoring and control is the process of keeping track of the identified risks, monitoring residual risks and identifying new risks, ensuring the execution of the risk plans and evaluating their effectiveness in reducing risk. Risk monitoring and control is an ongoing process for the life of the project.

This section should identify how the risks will be tracked on an ongoing basis. I usually do this with some sort of risk register – which is usually a separate spreadsheet (and may be combined with an issues list depending on the size of the project) or it is a separate ongoing section of the weekly status report.

Review/Approval

It is likely not necessary that the Risk Management Plan be a formal deliverable on the project. However, it is important that it be something that both the delivery team Project Manager and the customer-side project sponsor signoff formally and communicate the importance to team members on both sides of the project. Again, establishing this process and its importance at the beginning of the project will help ensure that everyone is considering and looking out for risk items throughout the engagement.

Final Thought

If this information is helpful to any Project Managers out there, I’d be happy to share a template for my version of the Risk Management Plan. Feel free to email me at brad@bradegeland.com if you want a copy.

A Framework for Building High-Performance Teams

What exactly is meant by a high-performance team? First we examine the attributes of such a team and present a model that will help us build one. High-performance teams are more than merely highly productive. A team composed of experienced, capable people can be very productive until those people hit an obstacle or are confronted with an unexpected challenge. This is the point at which the team either shows its strength or reveals its limitations. Teams that successfully persevere tend to have certain characteristics:

• A positive team environment
• Collaborative problem-solving
• Leadership

We can break the components of a strong project team into three areas:

• A strong team requires each of the individual components
• The strength of the team in the way the pieces work together
• Weakness in one component cannot be compensated for by strength in another component

The three primary components in the team model—positive team environment, collaborative problem solving, and leadership—are described below with their component parts.

A Positive Team Environment

A positive environment promotes trust and respect among team members and increases performance through more productive work habits. Creating this environment requires four specific elements:

1. Ground rules that describe the work patterns and values of the team
2. A team identity built on commitment to a shared goal
3. The ability to listen
4. The ability to effectively manage meetings

Broken into these elements, we see that a positive environment is not merely an abstract feeling; it is a set of observable skills that a project manager can instill. Further, this positive environment produces two important characteristics of the high-performing team:

1. Personal ownership of the team goal
2. Strong interpersonal relationships based on trust and respect

Collaborative Problem-Solving Capability

We have established that project teams solve a series of problems and that they need to learn to work together to solve those problems. Build this collaborative capability by focusing on four team abilities:

1. Problem-solving skills tied to an accepted problem-solving process. A team made up of individuals with diverse skills and styles must agree on the process they’ll follow for working through problems, both large and small. A commonly accepted problem-solving process enables all team members to flex their styles because each understands and trusts the process.
2. Understanding and applying multiple decision modes. Some decisions are made solely by the project leader; other decisions are made by the entire team. These are only two examples of decision modes. Efficient decision making requires that a team understand the possible decision modes and consciously choose which are appropriate for any decision.
3. Conflict-resolution skills. Producing superior decisions demands creativity, which necessarily produces disagreement. Mature teams accept and value the inevitability of conflict. They have the skills to leverage conflict to achieve the best decisions while maintaining strong relationships.
4. Continuous learning. When innovation and breakthrough solutions are required, the team’s culture must embrace a certain amount of risk taking and have the ability to improve its own performance throughout the project by learning from both success and failure.

Each of these capabilities can be developed by the team, though not all are simple. Together they create a truly synergistic result: decisions and products that are superior because they are developed by a team with diverse styles and talents.

Leadership

The keystone of our high-performance framework is the leader who ties the team together. No team will reach its potential without one or more people consciously attending to the health of the team. The key focus of the framework is the abilities that the team possesses. The actions a leader must take to nurture and establish these capabilities include:

• Attending to the health of the team. The leader must have a personal conviction that team health affects the project’s results.
• Maintaining the strategic vision. The project manager must maintain a steady focus on the outcome of the project and the path toward that goal.
• Attending to team members. Team member personal performance can vary according to their motivation, confidence in project leadership, respect with which they are treated. Recognize efforts and accomplishments regularly and openly to other team members and even customer project team members.
• Exhibiting and demanding accountability. Keep promises, deliver on responsibilities and hold team members accountable for their responsibilities and actions.

Note: This post has been taken primarily from one of my favorite Project Management books – The Fast Forward MBA in Project Management by Eric Verzuh (2^nd edition, 2005). However, some modifications and abbreviations of points were made.

More on CMS Tools

Choosing an effective content management system is an essential part of creating an information ecosystem for your project / organization. My last post introduced a few CMS Tools that you could choose from and today’s posts talks about a service that you could use to get started in the right direction.

CMS Matrix is one of the services i use pretty often when it comes to comparing content management systems. While this is definitely not the only checklist you need to use when selecting an application, it does help in giving you an overall picture of applications out there. While the information is more at a features level it does have one of the largest list of CMS applications i have seen on an free site.

However unlike CMS Watch the information here isn’t as detailed as you might like it to be, considering its a free service i wasn’t expecting all that much to begin with anyway.

It does allow for members to help with maintaining an updated list of information on the various applications currently hosted on the website.

There are a bunch of additional features that really make browsing this site a little more interesting.
Things like :

1. CMS with most clicks
2. With most views
3. With most compares
4. Most recently updated
5. Best Rated.

These additional bits of information give you an idea of what other people are looking at as well. It also gives you an update on industry news related to content management solutions and website management applications. A great way to keep an eye on the CMS market.

If you have come across another website that offers the same type of service, free or otherwise to leave a comment here….