Eight Tips for Knowledge Management Projects

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.” --Abraham Lincoln

Project leaders in customer service organizations today will admit that effective knowledge transfer is a crucial element to resolving customer problems. When done correctly, knowledge transfer accelerates problem resolution processes, fuels customer satisfaction and leads to greater organizational efficiency.

Organizations invest in processes and technologies that enable them to create, manage and publish knowledge, and that allow them to find, retrieve and share the enterprise’s knowledge across all support channels. Without formal knowledge management processes, companies would be unable to share knowledge with their customers, partners and employees.

When organization leaders consider investing in an enterprise-level knowledge management (KM) initiative, they generally conduct a detailed analysis of how to effectively tackle a project of such magnitude. Companies want to know how to best prepare for such projects, what pitfalls to avoid, and how to measure results that are generated from their KM implementation. They scrutinize internal short-term and long-term needs, organizational objectives and resources, customer needs, system requirements and technology implications. Companies conduct knowledge assessments, system assessments and develop a roadmap by which to guide the initiative. They consider the role of and impact on stakeholders, end users, partners, internal teams, customers and outside vendors. They try to anticipate and quantify the impact of the knowledge management project in their business processes, operations and ROI.

No amount of analysis and planning, however, will uncover every potential challenge or roadblock. Here, practitioners who have been through successful large scale knowledge management initiatives share their insights and lessons learned.

Tips
1. Over-communicate
“You can never underestimate the change management. Requirements, which go along with projects like these,” according to Mike Gower, Director of Training at MA Consulting. “You need a shared vision, supported and driven throughout the company from the highest levels of the organization.” Communicate regularly throughout all the phases of the project with business stakeholders and end-users. Follow a communication plan that keeps all parties included and responding. “You are going to be taking people outside of their comfort zone and they need to understand what you are doing. You can never over-communicate with a project like this,” said Gower.

2. Recruit the right people for the project
Identify and recruit the right people with the right skill sets from the start, making sure their skill sets align with the assigned tasks and responsibilities. Maintain a consistent vision throughout the implementation project. A knowledge manager at a leading insurance carrier suggests that practitioners ask themselves “whether the people who defined the specifications have been involved all the way through the implementation. Sometimes as people change in a project, it is easy to lose sight of what you originally thought versus what the new folks thought as they were introduced into the project.”

3. Solicit end-user input in the solution design
Involve end users in content identification, design and testing. Consider involving different representatives from different departments. These representatives should help identify sources of content; validate, enter and test content; help design the user experience; and provide feedback on which information should be made public for employees and customers. Such contributions will lead to greater user adoption.

4. Encourage user adoption with incentives
Employees may be reluctant to move out of their comfort zones or embrace new processes. Help employees understand the desired results and how they will be measured. Then, develop ways to recognize and reward individuals who adapt to the changes in the system to encourage its use. Rewarding and recognizing employee efforts to share knowledge are a powerful way to encourage this activity.

5. Identify content gaps and duplicates
Eliminate redundancy and pieces of content that overlap. Although content scrubbing is
an ongoing process, more scrubbing in the early phases of the KM project can help
make content more usable and help improve user adoption since users are able to quickly
locate the right content and do not have to go through duplicate content. A centralized knowledgebase provides visibility to content overlaps between teams.

6. Know the needs of your end users
Understand how language components impact search accuracy. Identify user search behaviors and consider search rules to improve the user’s experience. Understand how people use the resources they have available today. Understand the slang for key concepts, and how people from different departments may approach the same information but from different perspectives. These observations will provide excellent input for creating the first round of search rules for accuracy and efficiency.

7. Keep the end goal clearly in mind
Periodically evaluate how well you are adhering to your original specifications. It is important to make sure that decisions on whether to expand the effort or to maintain the effort are based on your business needs and the timing you are trying to achieve.

8. Consider the impact on existing business processes
Identify and understand all the existing processes that will no longer work with the new system so that these can be addressed. You need to understand the processes that will change and what is going to break or be different as you go into the implementation phase of your investigation.