Managing Knowledge-Based Initiatives

Stacy Land

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781136383724
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Managing Knowledge-Based Initiatives from Pilot to Enterprise Deployment shows practitioners how to take their successful knowledge management pilot programs and to successfully expand them throughout the organization.

Keeping the unique challenges of knowledge-based work in mind, Stacy Land explores what knowledge managers/project managers must know to effectively navigate within their organizations, position their work in a value-based framework, and publicize their work to increase buy-in. Topics include avoiding common sand traps, working with committees and multiple departments, compliance, entering a new world of politics and funding, achieving organizational alignment, developing and executing on a value proposition, negotiating executive sponsorship, and more.

Section VI

Executing on the Groundwork

8

Committees, Committees, Committees

One of the most weighted, and perhaps dreaded, terms in the business world is “committee.” You may try to avoid participating in voluntary committees or groan about the time wasted in mandatory ones. You might have belonged to a committee that was highly effective, where you learned good team management skills. Or, you might freeze at the thought of having to engage with, or present to, a committee. An ill-informed committee decision may have slowed, or stopped, your work in the past.

Committees come in all sizes and shapes and are called by many names. Some people serve on committees in addition to their regular jobs and rotate in and out after a given length of time. Some seats on committees are sought-after honors. Other people’s primary job function includes running or devoting a great deal of time to one or more business-based committees.

Committee Tips

Committees are Just Human, After All

There are no hard and fast rules around governance, purpose, structure, tenure, or perception of committees within or between companies. To complicate matters, the character of a given committee may be entirely different from year to year. Why? The people who comprise the committee may cycle out as new people cycle in. The first thing to remember when dealing with committees is that they are made up of people and reflect the beliefs, culture, values, and behavior of the people who belong to them.

Therefore, statements like, “Compliance committees are always tough” or “No one ever makes it past the IT change management committee,” are inaccurate. If you understand the people who make up the compliance committee, for example, its history, and their requirements, the tough committee will probably begin to appear manageable.

Moreover, the rules about which committees you will need to engage, what they do, and what they are named are very different from company to company. Even with the guidelines and methods we provide in Managing Knowledge-Based Initiatives, you will have to work through the process of navigating committees relying on your judgment and help from others in your firm.

Search Proactively

Following a common theme in Managing Knowledge-Based Initiatives, we believe that finding and subsequently engaging committees, groups, advisory councils, or boards – whatever they may be called in your organization – is a task you should undertake proactively. You have probably discovered by now that there is no cut-and-dried roadmap for your knowledge-based initiative’s implementation, so this is one more discovery path you need to undertake.

What are You Looking for?

If you are in a large organization, the chances are good that there are far more committees in total than there are committees relevant to getting your project off the ground. Target your efforts, and look for:

■ Committees that have sign-off control over activities that originate from your work area.

■ Committees that have governance over the activities of your prime customers as you have identified them to date.

■ Committees that control any supporting resource you will involve in your work, such as technology.

■ Committees that deal with compliance.

■ Committees that deal with projects, which should include your PMO.

■ Committees that deal with funding escalations and approvals (e.g., a group that must approve your work if the cost goes over $500,000).

■ Committees related to the “how” and “can you” around spending money. This should involve procurement and is addressed in .

■ Committees that have a degree of power or influence because of ongoing initiatives that are specific to your firm or industry.

■ Ancillary committees that are not required, but are “nice to haves” in the way of influence, such as leadership teams that oversee any of the previous committees.

Along the way, you may find other committees with which you need to interact.

Help is (Hopefully) Nearby

If you work for a firm that has a strong PMO presence, or offers Business Analysts who interact with business units on behalf of other units, ask for help. Like most other things we discuss in Managing Knowledge-Based Initiatives, networking is key. Before you start mapping out committees, engage people who can help and see if you can get a head start. Do not forget about your executive sponsor.

One key group that can assist you and may be a stakeholder in your work is the Legal department.

Engaging Your Legal Department

A knowledge-based initiative and the drivers that underlie it are very likely to make sense to a corporate lawyer. A person who has spent a career researching – often online or via CD-ROM – what happened before, why it happened before, and the final outcome will understand challenges around, for example, information codification, defining context, post-event analyses, effective search, and the desire to avoid recreating work already done. Even if the Legal department is not on your list of stakeholders, we advise that you consider placing them there for multiple reasons:

■ When it comes to understanding your firm’s current challenges, Legal staff can offer a different and well-informed viewpoint.

■ A friendly face from your firm’s Legal department can validate your list of committees and identify any gaps.

■ When planning for the future, a Legal advocate can help you be realistic about six-month-out scenarios.

■ Many high level committees have a member from the Legal department that holds a permanent seat.

■ An advocate on the Legal staff can likely connect you to executives that may be hard for you to reach alone.

■ If you are actively seeking participants for your knowledge-based initiative, a Legal supporter can potentially point you in the right direction.

■ The Legal department itself may be a good fit for your initiative – and they probably have alternative buckets of funds from which to draw.

■ Final judgments on what is compliant and what is not often come down to Legal staff. Keeping them informed of your activities early on can be valuable.

Your Committee Scavenger Hunt

In a corporation, hundreds and hundreds of committees may exist. How do you know which ones you need to engage? It may seem like a scavenger hunt.

Follow the Headcount and the Money

Whether you need to engage a particular committee depends on a few things. Are people from an area the committee oversees, such as a workgroup or region, going to participate in your initiative in significant numbers? And is that workgroup or region going to contribute to your project in the form of dollars or other resources, including tradeoffs? If the answer is yes to any one of these questions, the chances are good you will have to get an OK from someone who oversees that area.

Keep your eyes peeled for committees that fall into one or more of the following categories.

Sign-Off in Your Work Area

Before you look attempt to locate unknown committees, check in with committees in your own work area that need to know what you are doing. For example, does your boss, or your boss’ boss, belong to a leadership team that controls where resources in your division are allocated? Is your department or division contributing funds (other than those represented by your headcount) to your knowledge-based initiative? If so, check with your supervisor to validate whether there are entities in your area that you need to engage. You may find that keeping your boss’ boss up to date on your activities is a necessary activity – but not committee-driven.

Committees that Govern the Activities of Your Prime Customers

Your customers may be responsible to committee(s) that need to approve their participation in an initiative, funds they contribute, or both. To make matters more complex, there may be “tiered” committees that function at different levels. Particularly if you start small and grow, you might have to engage with multiple tiers. Tiers are often number or geography-driven.

For example, imagine that you worked with a local Marketing group while piloting your knowledge-based initiative. At some point, someone from that group gave a thumbs up, whether formal or informal, to the local marketing group’s participation. If you expand your work to now include 50 participants from Marketing, you may have to get additional sign-off because of the number of people involved. Ask; do not be blindsided.

In addition, if you expand your work from the local Marketing group to include the state, and then the regional Marketing group, you may have to get approval at these different levels. In some firms, you might be able to get the highest level approval (regional, in this case) and that would cover the lower level approvals. In others, you may have to engage with all three committees.

Supporting Resources

To identify supporting resources, close your eyes for a moment and picture your knowledge-based initiative running successfully at full capacity. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and imagine their daily activities. Try to answer these questions:

■ Who will your customers call when something is not working?

■ Who will they call with questions about how to do, or initiate, something?

■ Who will they call with requests that the program or tool do more?

■ Who will they call to add or remove people from participation in your knowledge-based initiative?

Think about the programs you participate in today. Whom do you call with these types of questions? Every area you identify is a supporting resource you may need to engage in the course of launching your knowledge-based initiative. Later in Managing Knowledge-Based Initiatives, we discuss how to work with your organization’s support structures, such as a Help Desk.

Technology-Related Committees

Compliance, standards, and security. IT compliance committees may or may not be related to an IT standards committee. The linkage seems obvious – after all, if you are using in-standard tools, you should be largely compliant – but the committees that govern both may operate separately. In addition, you may find that compliance happens at different levels (e.g., local vs. regional, 10 people vs. 100 people, pilot vs. production), while IT standards tend to cut across all levels. Security may be driven by a desire to comply with corporate guidelines, but security is not compliance in and of itself. Likewise, security does not necessarily represent a standard. If it seems that the three should be closely related, you are right – but they are not identical.

Actual technology used. This includes software, and potentially hardware if your software requires a certain hardware configuration, or an eager vendor is willing to donate hardware to help you get started. If your knowledge-based initiative includes introducing new technology into your firm, seek out any technology standards committees early on.

Security. The people who ensure that you are using approved hardware and software are likely different than the people who ensure that what you are using, and how you want to use it, is secure. First of all, they determine what secure means in your firm. Because of external events in recent years (think of everything from hurricanes and changes in technology to multiple data thefts and Sarbanes Oxley legislation), most IT departments pay more attention to security now than they did a decade ago. If you are in a regulated environment, such as healthcare, you may have another layer of security that is necessary to meet government requirements.

In addition, because the Internet and its associated protocols offers numerous new ways of sharing information – which, after all, is part of what a knowledge-based initiative usually involves – if you do not build a good working relationship with your firm’s security people, you could be a collision course with them.

Count on investigating whether you need to involve IT security if your knowledge-based initiative:

■ Introduces new software into the firm, particularly if it is web-based;

■ Opens up information that was previously inaccessible to users for any purpose;

■ Involves sharing outside of your company by opening up part of a current system (e.g., providing valued customers with their own portal);

■ Involves allowing outside people to tunnel into your existing environment (e.g., providing valued customers a way to log into your systems to check invoices);

■ Runs on devices other than a computer, like a Blackberry, cell phone, or other hybrid;

■ Uses technology that does not allow for transaction archiving. For example, if your solution includes an instant messaging component, investigate whether there is a way to archive those conversations for business compliance. Even if you are not a proponent of conversation archiving, it may not be optional from a security and compliance point of view. Just make sure you heavily publicize the fact that it is archived with your end users.

The number of seats. Your firm may have number-driven standards. The number of people that participate in your knowledge-based initiative may become a standards, support, pricing, or hardware standards trigger. In one firm we know of, a knowledge-based initiative remained in “pilot” (instead of production) status although it grew exponentially. When the number of participants topped 2,000, the project leader got a call from the IT standards committee. By their rules, the software tools used in the knowledge-based initiative had to be declared a corporate standard because of the number of people using them. This entailed a new and separate chain of committee appearances. The point to take away is that the knowledge practitioner was not aware and did not proactively engage this committee.

If you encounter a similar situation, even if you do not call the standards committee first, be prepared to answer their questions. Incidentally, the declaration of this knowledge practitioner’s toolset as a corporate standard also led to the pilot being declared a full-blown program. The bureaucracy helped shake loose a process roadblock that had resulted in the work rem...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Author Biography
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• SECTION I. LAYING THE GROUNDWORK
• SECTION II. READY, SET, GO
• SECTION III. ORGANIZATIONAL ALIGNMENT
• SECTION IV. SUPPORT: WHO IS ON YOUR SIDE?
• SECTION V. THE VALUE OF A VALUE PROP
• SECTION VI. EXECUTING ON THE GROUNDWORK
• SECTION VII. COMMUNICATIONS, SALESMANSHIP AND PUBLICITY
• Index