LIN – NYC

I recently attended the Learning Innovation Network conference in New York city. The conference is a joint venture between Jeanne Meister and the folks over at the Human Capital Institute. The event was hosted by Merrill Lynch.

I was invited to present on my experiences with Communities of Practice at HDS as part of a panel with Tracy Dodd from CA. Together we talked about our experiences with communities and the tools we use to support them. I noted that the folks at CA are using SharePoint 2007 to connect their communities.

The coolest part of the conference was the demo of how Merrill Lynch (now part of Bank of America) uses mobile learning. Merrill Lynch’s application MoBull (great name!) pushes content to their employee’s Blackberries. Read more about the application at CLO Magazine.

Overall I learned a lot. Having never attended a ‘learning and development’ event it was interesting to see how companies can focus on developing their people. I was even more struck by the 70:20:10 rule. I’ll be posting more on that soon.

CLO Magazine

Jeanne Meister at CLO Magazine was looking for experiences on Communities of Practice. Our VP of Academy was nice enough to connect the two of us and the resulting conversation was this article on Communities of Practice in the Workplace.

The article mentions that I’m working on a Community of Practice starter kit. Jeff Maaks now at PragmaticPS and I have been discussing it for some time, so now I guess we have to actually do it!

Boston KM Forum

On May 15th, Lynda Moulton of the Boston KM Forum asked me to present on my experiences and journey as I continue to build a KM program at HDS. I focused on how we set about building our first community of practice, a time line for the program and some future goals.

For me, it wasn’t a typical presentation where I speak and there’s no feedback. Since it was a small group and a small room it lead to some great discussion. As I would share my experiences, others would share theirs as well and I took away more as a result!

You can read about what other’s took away:
Knowledge Jolt by Jack Vinson
A Matter of Degree by Sadalit Van Buren
Sims Learning Connection by Ray Sims
I also met David Hobbie author of Caselines, who had some good suggestions for getting funding and support for my KM program.

Many thanks to all who attended and participated in the event, and my apologies for the late start.

Update on Communities of Practice

Our first community of practice is now about 10 months old and has about 65 listed members. Our monthly virtual meetings on Webex and conference call average about 20 members and there is a core of 4 members that help to make it work. This CoP is made up of members from Europe, Australia, Asia and North America and from functional groups like Professional Services, Product Management, Product Support, Marketing, Pre-Sales Support and Advanced Consulting. As a group they produce a small amount of IP that can be directly associated with the CoP, averaging a quality IP asset once every two months.

My second CoP is five months old and has 36 listed members, of which an average of 12 attend the monthly Webex and conference calls. This CoP is unique in that 3 employees of a partner company participate regularly to share information. There is a core group of three members that work to make the meetings interesting and lively. This CoP also has regular participation from our Training / Academy group. IP asset output has been limited in this group, averaging about a quality document every three months.

The third CoP is also five months old and has 38 listed members. Attendance at the monthly meetings for this group has been the lowest of the three at 8-10 members per call. Getting attendance from the various functional groups has been a challenge. Though the meetings have had surprisingly detailed and open discussions, more so than the other two CoPs. IP asset output is also a quality document every three months.

Lastly the SharePoint User Group (4th CoP) lists 52 members. This is an entirely virtual group with only an email d-list as the means of communication. I intend to move this to a Forum style group once I am able to secure the right platform. Questions posted to the group usually are answered in less than 30 mins if someone knows the answer. The issue here is SharePoint is new to almost everyone, so there are few true gurus in the group. Membership is also across functional groups and geographies. Once I get enough time and learn more about each member I intend to host a quarterly or bi-monthly user group call. We will be using SharePoint 2007 in the upcoming months and I’m sure that will spur a lot of questions, without immediate answers.

I am reminded about my earlier analogy that CoPs are like snow flakes, no two are alike. Here at HDS we have three CoPs aligned to strategic company goals and one aligned to internal support. Each consists of members in similar functional groups, have similar job descriptions and similar goals, but the “personality” of each CoP is quite different. Feedback on the CoPs from the members and their managers has been positive. There is still much more I think we can accomplish in each group, I am just out of bandwidth to drive more output. Though I’ve found in general that quality output takes time regardless of CoP. CoP participation and contribution must compete with other priorities of its members so I’ve found that it takes three months for any worthwhile guide or content to be completed.

Community Council

Its a lot of work pulling together a community of practice. Lots of time is spent communicating with the community members to get them excited about the CoP and contributing to it. Also you have to spend some time tracking some basic metrics on the CoP, keeping up with membership and setting the topics for our monthly meetings.

For my most mature CoP I have decided to implement a Community Council to help bring together the various pieces of the community. The council consists of 4 current CoP members who have been very active in the community. My initial take on the responsibilities for the council are:

1. Actively getting the word out and inviting new members
2. Setting of the monthly meeting agenda
3. Host a meeting from time to time
4. Help with maintaining the CoP SharePoint site
5. Set direction and goals for the CoP
6. 6-month commitment as a council member

I am curious if any of you use or have used in the past a similar structure to help build a CoP.

Sharepoint User Group

This past week I launched an HDS SharePoint User group. The idea is to bring together all of the HDS Sharepoint administrators and see if we could learn from each other. Right now I’m in the process of trying to get each user to introduce themselves and list the Sharepoint site they are responsible for. The group also includes some of the IT folks who are responsible for administering and designing the sharepoint sites.

My goals in trying to build this group are to:
1. Provide an avenue for HDS team site admins to get help and questions answered
2. Begin to develop some requirements for SP 2007
3. Have the SP admins demo their sites so we can all learn/see what other groups are doing and ’steal’ some ideas

I didn’t call this a SharePoint Community of Practice, as most people are familiar with the concept of a user group around a specific application. And I don’t expect that the group will be creating any new IP. I’m also trying a different method of performing introductions through email rather than at a formal meeting. Its also my first try at building a group that doesn’t have a management mandate. So the direction and time commitment will vary widely.

New Communities Launched!

Well over the past few weeks I’ve been working to contact and communicate to about 40 different people what a Community of Practice (CoP) is and why they would want to be a part of one. We recently launched two new CoPs aligned to our lines of business. One in mid-June the other on Tuesday this week. Attendance to both calls was pretty good about 16 people attended each call from all three main Geos (APAC, Americas, EMEA) and they were from across our technical functional groups.

Now we have 3 CoPs running for each of which I act as the Community Coordinator. The goals for all three groups are the same: To capture knowledge and best practices and share that with other HDS colleagues.

The 1st CoP has been running the longest at 6 months. We have had 6 meetings and attendance varies between 10 and 12 people across GEOs and functional groups. At our last meeting I asked how the the members thought the calls were going. And the response was all positive though everyone was awfully quiet. If anyone has ideas on how to jump start the conversation on a conference call I would appreciate any insights. It seems to take people at least 10-15 mins to warm up before they start discussing.

Also I recently read a great white paper on Evolving Communities of Practice by Patricia Gongla and Christine Rizzuto who studied CoPs at IBM Global Services after the communities were active for about 5 years. I was pleased to see that all communities are not the same, have different rates of growth and different levels of participation. From the reading I now characterize CoPs as snow flakes. No two snow flakes are alike, hence no two CoPs are alike. I was also able to get in touch with one of the authors Christine Rizzuto, who consultants with companies and non-profits on setting up CoPs. Christine was a wealth of information and I will be sure to try to learn as much from her as I can.

Communities of Practice – Top Down vs Bottom Up

Recently I attended an online event put on by Corporate University Exchange. The topic was Communities of Practice as done by the folks at Caterpillar. The presenter was Paul Walliker, who runs the Caterpillar University and also oversees the Caterpillar Communities of Practice. Paul was gracious enough to answer some of my questions after the presentation.

What I found interesting is that the Caterpillar communities have no direction from on high. Caterpillar’s communities are self starting, almost entirely virtual and include employees as well as dealers and other non-Caterpillar folks. They exist to serve themselves and help their fellow community members and have varying degrees of active participants vs lurkers. They form because the individual members think that there is a need for one. I think he said there were about 5000 communities at Caterpillar.

At HDS, we’ve taken a much different way of developing a community of practice. We have started out with one, and will soon have two more. Thus far our community participation takes the form of monthly conference calls to share and we also use email. The areas for communities to focus on were selected based on business directives for the company. This is not to say that these areas are unimportant to the community members, quite the contrary.

CoPs have been at Caterpillar for sometime, and most of their 300,000 plus employees are a part of at least one. HDS by comparison is around 3000 employees and communities of practice are very VERY new to us. However, both companies have similar expectations for their communities, to help their fellow employee, share information and encourage use and reuse of knowledge, ultimately to make the company more successful.

I am curious how you selected your communities? Top Down or Bottom Up? And if there is a place for both corporate directed communities and individual initiated communities at the same company?

KM Approach

I’ve been asked to develop a plan for my KM strategy. So with lots of help I came up with the following. Its still not been finalized so I expect somethings to change. But I thought it would be useful to share and see if any of you had an opinion of it.

Introduction
The KM program will be used to build awareness of the need for specific Knowledge Management (KM) tasks and to change behaviors to support KM, so that they become an integral part of ‘How we do business’ and not an overlay to business. Currently our group does not have a defined approach to KM nor does it execute good KM practices regularly.
Good KM practices in our group, are simply:

• Optimizes a process or service as a result of a post-project or service review
• Regular and timely contribution to a central repository of information
• Improves the competitiveness of our group by updating delivery kits, best practices etc
• Provides a foundation for repeatability and reuse of knowledge, best practices and lessons learned
• Finding a way to share with others what you know to increase technical and business competency within our group

Success Metrics
For the first year these are the metrics that will define if the KM program was successful:

• 25 billable customer projects underwent post-project reviews.
• 2 or more Communities of Practice aligned with corporate strategic initiatives.
• 3 or more Practitioner’s Guides developed and produced by CoPs aligned with corporate strategic initiatives.
• The number of hours per week spent by consultants on KM objectives steadily increased and then leveled out over the year.

Keys to Success
Though the KM program is focused on our group; we do not operate in a vacuum. A successful KM program will require:

• Active participation and support from product and marketing. Such support would be in the form of participating in CoPs, providing review and oversight on knowledge assets such as Practitioner’s Guides, Best Practices, Whitepapers etc and contributing to any knowledge bases.
• Commitment from global management to provide the necessary consultant time to participate in KM activities.

First Year Objectives
In order to achieve these behavioral changes here are the most important objectives that I will be focused on:
1. Define the specific KM tool for some specific project-related tasks

a. Inventory current KM tools such as Sharepoint, Groove, Wiki etc
b. Determine which tools are appropriate to specific tasks
c. Define business governance of how and where each tool should be applied and used
d. Develop list of gaps of current tool set and find possible solutions

2. Working with Human Resources and Management to review and, if needed, update, consultants’ Job Descriptions to include an expectation of KM activities such as:

a. Sharing documents and knowledge with others
b. Centralizing or submitting all key project deliverables to make available to others
c. Actively participating in one or more Communities of Practice
d. Updating existing guides, delivery kits, knowledge bases
e. Participating in project reviews for each project delivered

3. Each Consultant must have a consistently-defined KM objective in their annual performance review for creating, collecting, sharing and reusing assets and knowledge
4. Develop multiple methods through which consultants can complete their KM objective(s) in their PPR.

a. Create and Support Communities of Practice to allow consultants to share their knowledge
b. Facilitate Project Reviews to capture new techniques to improve execution and customer satisfaction
c. Facilitate the creation or updates to a variety of documents including but not limited to Practitioner Guides, Best Practices Whitepapers etc

5. Develop and build the case for a dedicated KM budget to support:

a. Face to Face meetings
b. Small recognition prizes for good KM behavior (iPods?)
c. Potential credits for consultant time toward KM practices
d. Determine if outside consulting help is necessary for success
e. Determine if additional KM staff is necessary for success

3 Month Objectives
Currently the focus of the KM program is on specific products and services. In order to successfully build and sustain KM in this area the following 3 Month objectives are proposed:
1. Develop and execute a Community of Practice for these products and services
2. Define and create specific output from the CoP in the form of recommendation guides (Practitioner Guides)
3. Create a baseline of KM awareness and importance among management and consultants.

a. Using an online survey, phone interviews and using some KM tool statistic gathering.
b. Communications to management and consultants on progress, output, and successes

4. Track consultant and CoP member time.

a. To allow for accurate tracking
b. To create a baseline of effort involved
c. To drive the definition of what is a KM activity and what is a core-business activity (.i.e. billable time) and where they overlap

5. Create a destination for the content and a mechanism for sharing it

Conclusion
My goal is at the end of 3 years, the separate groups will have incorporated the various processes and practices into their own methods. Also, KM would encompass other strategic initiatives, so that a formal corporate led KM initiative is no longer needed, but is self sustaining throughout the company.

2nd Community of Practice Meeting

As part of my new role in KM at my company, I’ve been trying to develop a Community of Practice for one of the company’s strategic initiatives. I wrote about our first meeting back in January, so to continue here are the results of our second meeting, held this week. Though the audience was smaller, due to the time selected and members vacations’, the meeting itself was a small success. This CoP consists of members from North America, Europe and Australia. So there is no time that is best for everyone. Our first meeting was North America and Europe friendly. This second meeting was North America and Australia friendly. So most of the European members were not able to join, thus less attendance. At least I hope the timing was the reason and not lack of interest. Like the first meeting this was conducted via WebEx. Unlike the first meeting, there was a one PowerPoint with the meeting’s agenda and I acted as more meeting facilitator (think ToastMaster), and did little formal speaking. The agenda was simply:

• Introduction of new members
• Progress update on some of the knowledge assets that members were working on
• Review of items in the Donation Box
• Discussion on 3 topics

There were 2 new members, the total now stands around 16 participants from the 3 continents. So I had them introduce themselves to the group.

Part of the CoP goals are to create recommended practice (not best practice, since there is no such thing) guides. There was limited success updating an existing guide and members provided technical review of the content. A new guide is also in the works and some members are creating the content, and others have volunteered to review. Hopefully a reviewable version will be completed prior to the next meeting. This was the extent of the progress update.

The Donation Box review simply looked at the contents of the Donation Box and asked the member who submitted something to talk about it. The Donation Box is a simple file repository that members can upload any document they have created that they think is worthy of additional review and that the content should be shared. I can’t take credit for the name, but I thought it was a great name for what it was.

Prior to the meeting I had discussed with a couple members about topics they could talk about and generate group discussion on. So during the discussion section it was simply a matter of handing over the ‘floor’ to each member to lead the discussion. While the discussion did not solve all of the issues touched on, it was detailed, collegial and open. Several follow-up items came out of the discussion and hopefully will lead to some solutions.

Lastly the call was recorded so that those who did not attend could listen to the playback. I provided a time index so members could skip to the section they wanted too. In listening to the playback I did find I need to speak up more on the calls so I am better heard (sigh, one of my personal improvement goals). Also it is possible to track the amount of times the recording is played back so I will report on that in the future.