A lot of organizations have an method for identifying and recording lessons discovered, perhaps as portion of a post-project critique or similar process. Regrettably, lessons learned reports have a tendency to end up on a shelf gathering dust, or lost in the un-chartered corner of a fileserver somewhere. Let’s get real. How many people today will really trawl diligently by means of a quantity of lessons learned documents in order to glean some important point? The reality is, if you can motivate personnel to initiate any sort of “learning just before performing” activity, then you?re undertaking pretty well.
Recall the final time you packed your bag in preparation for a enterprise trip?
All these things you will need to remember? tickets, passport, currency, itinerary, get in touch with, driving license, power adaptor, Ipod?
We handle to bear in mind the factors we need for our enterprise trips without having going through each and every past suitcase-packing experience in our minds, 1 by 1. Somehow, we retain a meta-level list in our memories. And however, when it comes to lessons discovered, we count on individuals in our organizations to perform thought a pile of lessons learned reports in the hope that a important insight will leap out at them?
We require to come across methods to package expertise into very easily accessible “know-how assets” – structured with a consumer in thoughts.
The measures below are taken from the greatest-selling fieldbook “Understanding to Fly – Practical knowledge management from leading and learning organisations”, written by Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell. They do not need sophisticated, bespoke technology just a wilingness to consider-via and structure what has been discovered.
1. Identify a customer for this information. Have a clear client – current or future – in thoughts when considering the creation of a understanding asset.
2. Get clear what your expertise asset is genuinely about. What is the scope of your knowledge asset? A understanding asset demands to cover a distinct region of business activity.
three. Identify a community of practice relating to this topic. The neighborhood will be the supply of the information initially, the users of the knowledge in immediate term, and the men and women who have an on-going responsibility for validating the future contents of in the understanding asset. This is important ? or there is a genuine threat that you will end up with an electronic time capsule – a snapshot in time of the way issues applied to be accomplished – rather than the current, prized know-how in your organisation.
four. Collate any current material upon which you can base your knowledge asset and look for common suggestions. Deliver some context so that persons can recognize the purpose and relevance of the information asset. Are there basic suggestions that you can distil out of this material?
5. Build a checklist illustrated with examples and stories. The checklist need to tell the user of the expertise asset:
“What are the questions I will need to ask myself?”
“What are the steps that I require to take?”
Illustrate PKM Guide with examples, stories, photographs, digital photographs, models, quotes, video and audio clips if doable.
6. Contain hyperlinks to people. Generate a hyperlink to the person’s individual house web page or e-mail address wherever you mention them in the text. Include a list of all the folks with any connection with the content. Use thumbnail photographs if you have them readily available.
7.Validate the Suggestions Circulate the guidelines around the community again, and ask “Do the guidelines accurately reflect your know-how and expertise?” “Do you have something to add?”
8. Publish the expertise asset. Retailer the knowledge in a space exactly where it can be accessed by its community. Usually this will imply the enterprise intranet.
9. Initiate a feedback and ownership approach. Encourage feedback from users, so that they choose up and do away with any invalid suggestions. Instil a sense of obligation that “if you use it, then you must add to it”.
Over time, you’ll make up a series of expertise assets which relate to the important practices in your organisation ? the places which can bring competitive benefit. The creation of these tangible expertise assets gives a focus for the communities of practice linked with each 1, and eventually will give credibility to your expertise management efforts.