A Word from the Wise
I was sorry to have missed the actKM conference this year, but thanks to Matt Moore, we have some of the sounds from that venerable affair (they had a capuccino machine!).
Matt asked Mark, David, Arthur, Graham, Keith and Cory for their words of advice to new knowledge managers and kindly created a podcast. Here are the highlights:
- Don’t try to boil the ocean, focus on 2-3 things that help the business (Mark Schenk)
- Try to find small things that make a big difference (Mark Schenk)
- Don’t do things that other people can do (Mark Schenk)
- Focus on addressing business problems, don’t get distracted by the KM theory (David Gurteen)
- Find someone in management who cares, and then give them successes that make them look a hero (Arthur Shelley)
- Define your KM activities into a project and break it down into bite sized pieces (Graham Durant-Law)
- Be prepared to evolve, start small, and grow (Graham Durant-Law)
- Start in the middle (ie in an area of the operations) and grow it outwards (Keith De La Rue)
- Discover the KM-friendly activities that are already happening and work with them (Cory Banks)
3 Comments so far
- Graham Durant-Law
Hi Patrick and Naguib.
Start small and grow can be achieved a couple of ways. First identify an area of pain. In the TARDIS project this was Project Definition Funds (PDF). There was no system to collect and manage these funds across the organisation. A simple standardised EXCEL workbook was the answer. Deploying these into known directories across the organisation provided a tool for the desk officers. Because they were deployed into known directories a little bit of code allowed them to be aggregated literally using a button. Managers found this very useful and it saved days of work for the finance people. Three groups of people ended up with a win simply by standardising a workbook.
Another example was to target one project and provide assistance to publish everything either in a database or onto one of two intranet websites. This person looked professional, was super-organised, and could provide answers quickly. He became the champion, and soon everyone in his directorate adopted the same approach.
Regards Graham
- Patrick Lambe
Mark from Anecdote posted today about small interventions that make a big difference at
http://www.anecdote.com.au/archives/2008/11/knowledge_strat_5.html
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Hi,
One of the KM projects that can give good visibility and management buy in is developing a KM portal(considering there is no proper DMS available) with some Web 2.0 functionalities. But portal is a big thing and requires vast amount of time and resources.
“Start Small and grow..."- what could be some small scale KM projects?
Posted on November 02, 2008 at 06:00 PM | Comment permalink