Knowledge Management News & Articles

How Encouraging a Knowledge Culture Can Affect Your Bottom Line

For engineering-focused organizations, recent economic uncertainty is complicated by an emerging “engineering gap,” as the current population of experienced baby boomer engineers will soon retire. This begs the question, how will the next generation of engineers be prepared to fill this knowledge gap if organizations don’t take some type of action?

Which is where “knowledge cultures” come in.

We all know that organizations have corporate cultures, representing the norms, assumptions, shared values, and artifacts within a company. But, whether it’s acknowledged or not, part of that culture relates to how an organization values knowledge. Some organizations place a high value on the provision and sharing of information, especially as it related to applied to learning and innovation, thus exhibiting a knowledge culture.

And, while some companies demonstrate that they highly value knowledge and invest time and resources into creating and maintaining it, others don’t – often at their peril.

Read the entire article here.

Website Content Management For Hotels…Boon or Boondoggle?

Imagine having the ability to change and update the content of your hotel’s website on your own; change text, add information, that would be great. At the onset, it sounds terrific. No more waiting for your site developer to make the changes and additions you requested.

You can maintain information on your site, right at the property level. Simply choose someone to type in the changes. No more calls or emails to your site developer to make additions and changes; that would be a boon to your website’s production as well as save time and money, right?

Wrong. For most hotels, it’s actually chock-full of potential problems and pitfalls; a real boondoggle.

Content management usually features a template website design, which allows the site owner to change selected sections of the site itself. The concept has been used for retail sites which require constant, even daily, inventory and price changes to keep them current.

Read the entire article here.

Kofax Named to KMWorld Magazine’s “100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management” for 2009

Kofax plc (LSE:KFX), the leading provider of Intelligent Capture & Exchange solutions, today announced that the company was named by KMWorld magazine, a leading content, knowledge and document management publication, to its annual “100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management” for 2009.

“Each of the companies on the 2009 ‘100 Companies’ list was thoroughly evaluated, and each has clearly contributed value to the industry,” said Hugh McKellar, Editor-in-Chief at KMWorld. “Innovation is a key element that sets these companies apart from others and we believe they are the very best at delivering solutions that help organizations to streamline processes and highlight the positive gains in the efficiency of knowledge workers. Kofax is well deserving of this recognition.”

Read the entire article here.

Requirements Traceability Matrix

Wikipedia defines Requirements Traceability as “a sub-discipline of requirements management within software development and systems engineering. Requirements traceability is concerned with documenting the life of a requirement.”

Proposal Use

My first experience with Requirements Traceability Matrices (RTM) dates back to proposal work I performed in the late 1980’s.  Working for an organization that specialized in financial aid processing contracts through the U.S. Department of Education, I started as an application developer and moved into Project and Program Management after 5-6 years.  In both of these roles I worked on large proposals as needed – sometimes on a team, sometimes leading a team.  We utilized a Requirements Traceability Matrix to ensure that we properly responded – in our proposal – to every possible requirement extracted from the customer’s Request for Proposal (RFP).  When tens of millions of dollars are on the line, we wanted to make sure every base was covered and it definitely seemed to help.

In the RFP-Proposal case, documenting requirements in a matrix like this gave us an edge in the proposal review process.  It made it clear to the customer that we understood the RFP, successfully extracted the requirements from the text of this large Request for Proposal (and they were VERY large), and every incident of response in the proposal to each specific requirement was also captured in the matrix identifying section and page number.  It’s probably unfortunate that after winning the contract it was not taken any further.  Once the contract was awarded the matrix was left to die.  We should have continued to use it to ensure that the system was built to proper specifications and that is what would happen today, but it was a different time and because we were winning contracts that we were usually the incumbent for, we were really just updating the current software solution rather than building a new one from the ground up.

Using for the Entire Solution

My more recent experiences with Requirements Traceability Matrices are in Functional Design Documents (FDD) responding to both customer Statements of Work (SOW) as well as any documented and supplied customer-specified requirements (both high-level and detailed).  Using a matrix has helped me as the Project Manager as well as the rest of my delivery team members accurately identify all customer requirements by extracting them from the SOW and other customer provided requirements, documenting them in a spreadsheet and tracking them to matching requirements in the FDD and Technical Design Document (TDD).  We initially publish the matrix in the FDD – after that it becomes it’s own document and the life of each requirement is tracked through the TDD, design, development and testing.  This type of documentation gives the customer confidence that all requirements have been accounted for and can be traced through to the solution.  It also gives the delivery team confidence that they have covered all requirements and are building a solution that will meet the customer-specified requirements and therefore provide the customer with a useable solution.

The big difference these days is that we do use the RTM to develop from.  Not directly, but the RTM traces requirements through to the Technical Design Document and that is the basis for the development work that is performed and the basis, ultimately, for the final developed solution.

Summary

Customer requirements are obviously critical to the project and meeting those requirements is critical to project success.  Anything that can be done to ensure that requirements are in place and that the system is being developed well to those requirements not only gives the customer greatly increased confidence in the delivery team, but the final solution is much more likely to actually meet the business needs of the customer.

Effective Communication

This one is probably common sense, but needs to be discussed.  For you married Project Managers out there…how many times has your wife been absolutely certain she told you ‘x’ when you either heard ‘y’ or nothing at all?  And how many times has that worked the other way around?  My guess is that it’s at least a weekly occurrence. 

Granted, we’re often very casual with our ‘at home’ communication methods and we certainly aren’t committing discussions to notes like we do during our client conversations and status calls.  But our communications with our spouses are very important and we often drop the ball on them knowing full well how important they are and how much ‘in trouble’ we could get if they are misinterpreted or ignored.

Listen Effectively

What I’ve been trying to say so far in this article basically is that effective communication begins with effective listening.  As the Project Manager, our primary communication comes mainly from the following sources:

• Executive management
• Delivery team members
• Customer project sponsor
• Customer team members
• Delivery organization support personnel

How well we use and communicate this potentially critical information received from these sources is dependent – in a large part – on how well we have listened to and absorbed the information.  I highly recommend taking notes on any important calls, meetings, and adhoc conversations that affect your project. 

Document Well

If you develop a reputation for taking good notes and distributing critical notes and meeting updates to project team members, then your documentation will be well trusted on current and future projects.  This has worked well for me as I have a reputation for frequent emails to my project team members as well as providing follow-up notes following meetings and discussions. 

My team members and customers know I take detailed notes on calls – they like to joke about the keyboard noise they hear in the background while I’m leading status calls.  But they also never question me when I backup things that were promised or said on calls with notes that I’ve captured from those conversations because they know I’m listening and taking accurate notes of important project discussions.

Review Your Communications

In order to preserve this reputation, read, read and re-read communications that you are sending out.  If it’s not an emergency communication that needs to be made immediately, then take the time to proof-read your communication, check for appropriate email attachments and view your communication from the receiver’s point of view. 

The last thing you want is to have the reputation as the one how always has to send communications twice because you forgot the attachment the first time (you know who you are!).  Nor do you want the reputation of the one who sends rambling emails and documents that leave the reader confused or that fail to make a strong point.  If you struggle in this area, trying outlining your thoughts first and treat every written communication as if it were the most important thing you have to do today.

Summary

How you communicate information on your project can have a profound effect on the outcome.  Do whatever you can to ensure that you listen effectively and pass on information accurately to your team and to your customer.  Misunderstood and miscommunicated information can result in improper actions taken, assignments missed or misunderstood, and overall major impacts to project timelines and budgets.

Brown Bag Sessions at the Start of your Project

While there are a number of ways to engage in knowledge sharing one of the most powerful ones are of course the Brown Bag Session.

Brown bag seminars are generally offered to update the researching community about ongoing research. Usually held by schools and universities and governmental institutions, they involve lectures, presentations, or talks by researchers, mostly professors about their ongoing research. Professors may visit from other universities to talk about their research.

Brown bag seminars normally run an hour or two. Originally they were scheduled around lunchtime and participants were encouraged to bring their own lunch in a bag, explaining how the practice got its name. – Wikipedia

Why do this?

While there is no doubt that formalized learning, like trainings,  contribute heavily towards professional growth within an organization, however, the single biggest learning tool at our disposal is on-the-job learning. This allows people to leverage existing processes to create a structure around the way they work, while enabling a level of flexibility and creativity. The benefits of this approach would lead to new ways of successfully capturing, storing and share of tacit knowledge. Eventually leading to changes being made to existing processes, introducing new ones and in some cases doing away with the old.

Face-to-Face sessions are always important when it comes to knowledge sharing, this is because there is only so much knowledge a document can impart. Creating a platform which allows people to engage with one another is a very powerful tool.

How would you do this?

At the start of every project team members should be encouraged to present thoughts and ideas based on there previous experience and allow other team members to ask questions.

Some benefits of this approach are:

1. Allows the project manager to get a better understanding of his team and figure out where best to user them
2. Allowing team members to get to know one another.
3. Creating a platform that enables team members to showcase their knowledge and expertise .
4. Ensuring that knowledge and Best Practices from previous projects are re-used.
   

Knowledge in Projects

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.