Many organizations have an approach to defining and incorporating lessons learned, sometimes as part of a review after a project or similar process. Unfortunately, the lessons learned from the reports tend to end on a shelf collecting dust, or are lost somewhere in a not chartered corner of the file server. Take the real. How many people will really trawl diligently through a series of lessons learned documents to collect some key points? The reality is that if you can encourage employees to initiate any activity “to learn before”, then you? Re pretty good.
Remember the last time you packed your bag in preparation for a business trip?
Anything you need to remember? tickets, passport, currency, route, contact, driver's license, power adapter, Ipod?
We manage to remember what we need for our business trips, without experiencing every past experience of packing baggage in our minds, one by one. One way or another, we keep in our memories a list of meta-levels. And yet, when it comes to lessons, we expect people in our organizations to think about a bunch of lessons learned from reports, in the hope that key information will be leaked to them.
We need to find ways to pack knowledge into easily accessible “knowledge assets” - structured with the customer in mind.
The above steps are taken from the best-selling “Learning to Fly” - practical knowledge management from leading and learning organizations, written by Chris Collison and Jeff Parsel. They do not require sophisticated, bespoke technology, just to think through and structure what has been learned.
1. Identify the client for this knowledge. Keep a clear client - current or future - in mind when considering creating an asset of knowledge.
2. Clarify what your resource belongs to. What is the area of your knowledge resource? Knowledge assets should cover a specific area of business activity.
3. Identify the community of practice related to this issue. The community will initially be a source of knowledge, users of knowledge in the near term, and people who have ongoing responsibility for confirming the future contents of the knowledge asset. Is that the key? or there is a real danger that in the end you will receive an electronic time capsule - a snapshot in time, as was done before, and not current know-how in your organization.
4. Create any existing material that you can use for your knowledge, and see general recommendations. Provide some context so that people can understand the purpose and significance of a knowledge asset. Are there general guidelines that you can separate from this material?
5. Create a checklist, illustrated with examples and stories. The checklist should indicate to the user a resource of knowledge:
“What questions should I ask myself?”
“What steps should I take?”
Illustrate it with examples, stories, images, digital photos, models, quotes, videos and sound clips, if possible.
6. Include links to people. Create a hyperlink to the person’s personal home page or email address, wherever you mention them in the text. Include a list of all people with any content relationship. Use miniature photos if you have them.
7. Enter recommendations Spread the recommendations around the community and ask “Do these recommendations correctly reflect your knowledge and experience?” “Do you have anything to add?”
8. Publication of a resource of knowledge. Store knowledge in a space where it can be accessed by the community. Often this will mean an intranet company.
9. Initiate the process of feedback and ownership. Encourage user feedback to collect and eliminate any invalid recommendations. Consider the sense of duty that "if you use it, then you should add to it."
Over time, will you create a series of knowledge assets that relate to key practices in your organization? areas that can bring competitive advantages. Creating these tangible knowledge assets allows you to focus on the communities associated with each one of them, and it will give tremendously confidence to your knowledge management efforts.
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