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?

Dave

I was shocked when I saw the news last week. Dave Roberson had left HDS! I am very disappointed to see that Dave decided to leave HDS. I think one of Dave’s greatest strengths was his accessibility. He actually responded to email with meaningful comments and questions, he actively sought out employees to let him know what HDS could do better. The one and only time I met Dave our conversation was easy and open. I think his efforts to open up communication channels to HDS employees was very positive for the company. While I understand that Dave, like anyone else at any company, must look out for his/her own career, it is unfortunate that he couldn’t continue his 26 year career at HDS just a little longer. However, the storage industry is very small and it would not surprise me if he returns in some way. I wish him the best in his new role at HP.

SEND

I just got done reading Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe. A fantastic read on how to make the most of email. I, like most of you have used email for a long time, though I don’t think I ever went through some sort of formal class or training on how to write email. In school we learn about spelling, grammar, how to write an essay, research papers, how to footnote, reference and all manner of rules and styles around formal writing. But email it seems we take for granted.

Its assumed that everyone knows the rules for using email and how to use it effectively. When was the last time you saw a class at your university or provided through your employer on writing effective email? It seems odd, because in today’s high tech world we spend large volumes of time in front of the computer writing email, using IM and texting.

The authors of Send, David and Will, are editors for the NY Times and Hyperion Books respectively. Their book provides lots of insight and is written in a very easy to understand and humorous tone.

One of the things I never used except on rare occasions was the Exclamation Point ‘!’. I always felt it tended to overstate things. However the authors think that because conveying affect in email is difficult, an exclamation point can help to make your email more human. For example ‘Thanks’ vs ‘Thanks!’ or ‘Hooray’ vs ‘Hooray!’. Without the exclamation point each word sounds kinda flat and almost sarcastic.

There are lots of other such examples and tips in the book, so I highly recommend you read it if you use email for work, or for general correspondence with friends and family.

Analogies for Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management is a very broad subject. Lots of ideas, concepts and pre-conceived notions (right and wrong) exist about it. How do you cut through the baggage and half truths that your company’s management may have about KM. How do you correctly explain and convince your management and your customers that your KM objectives are worthwhile and attainable?

Perhaps, one way would be the use of story telling or using analogies to equate the broad field of KM into an easily understandable story. I would be interested in any stories you have used to successful communicate the goals of a KM program.

I’ve recently seen a lot of buzz around Corporate Storytelling. In fact there’s even a conference on it, called Golden Fleece. The Smithsonian is also having a one day conference on it. I wonder if the use of Web 2.0 tools can aid the story telling process thru podcasts, blogs and wikis. Incidently, the Web 2.0 Expo was this week. Jeremiah has been live streaming from the event.

Measuring Knowledge Management

So now that my company has decided to embark on a Knowledge Management (KM) path the inevitable question is: How do you measure success of the KM program? From the research I have done there seems to be no easy answers. The main issues are:

1. KM is a soft subject, it enables many different activities within a Professional Services organization but is not directly responsible for these activities.
2. Direct impact of KM on hard metrics such as Profitability, Resource Utilization, Resource Productivity, Margin etc are hard to attribute directly to KM, as any number of factors can influence these areas.
3. Collection of metrics can prove to be just as difficult as determining the appropriate metrics.

From the research I’ve done and conversations with my Board and other individuals I’ve come up with a categorized system of metrics.

• Indirect: These are metrics that KM has some degree of impact on but cannot be directly and solely attributed to KM activities. Such metrics include, Year over Year or Quarter over Quarter increase in:
  • Profitability
  • Margin
  • Overall Revenue
  • Other metrics that are measurable at a business unit level
  • Revenue from partners
• Direct: These are metrics that KM has a direct impact on and can be recognized as having contributed to. Capture of these metrics may require specialized tools or surveys. Metrics can include:
  • Employee satisfaction with finding information
  • Enhanced Customer & Employee collaboration
  • Enhanced Employee & Employee collaboration
  • Reduced ramp up time for new employees/partners
• Program: These are metrics about the KM program itself, in my case the Professional Services KM program.
  • Increase in the number of Project Reviews
  • Number of Knowledge assets grows
  • Increase in the number Communities of Practice
  • Number of hours spent by consultants on KM capture, update and use

While this is certainly not a complete list, I am sure there are more metrics. What other metrics do you use, and why?

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.

RSS & Reading Blogs

If you’ve found that you like to read blogs, except you can’t always find the time to go visit all your favorite blogs. Well one answer is to get a feed reader or other blog aggregator that will get the most recent posts from all your favorite blogs and either put them on a single webpage or will email you the latest entries.There are many aggregators out there, I think the most popular is Google Reader and there are some that plugin to your favorite browser such as Sage for FireFox.

However, if you are inside a company firewall and there are internal company blogs you like to read, some of the external readers such as Google Reader or Yahoo may not work. Also if, like me, you spend the majority of your day in Outlook, then finding a reader that plugs-in to Outlook can be useful. I have found, and use, RSS Popper. Which is free and adds another folder in your Inbox to collect the various blog feeds. It also works great with internal blogs and external blogs.

You can get feeds from a blog by subscribing to the blog’s RSS / Atom feed. Using RSS Popper to subscribe to a blog’s feed is a simple matter of copying the RSS link and pasting it into the correct RSS Popper field and clicking OK. You may have seen Atom on a blog page, it is just another method that a blog author/ blog site can use to syndicate their blogs. Both RSS and Atom are transparent to you the reader and as a reader, you only care about the RSS/Atom link. The feed for this site is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/kmapprentice

So go out and start gathering your favorite feeds into your favorite feed reader.