Lots of organizations have an approach for identifying and recording lessons discovered, maybe as part of a post-project overview or equivalent method. Unfortunately, lessons learned reports have a tendency to finish up on a shelf gathering dust, or lost in the un-chartered corner of a fileserver someplace. Let’s get genuine. How lots of persons will genuinely trawl diligently through a number of lessons learned documents in order to glean some crucial point? The reality is, if you can motivate staff to initiate any kind of “learning just before undertaking” activity, then you?re undertaking quite well.
Recall the final time you packed your bag in preparation for a small business trip?
All those factors you have to have to remember? Knowledge Management System , passport, currency, itinerary, speak to, driving license, power adaptor, Ipod?
We handle to keep in mind the factors we have to have for our small business trips without the need of going by way of each and every previous suitcase-packing encounter in our minds, a single by one. Somehow, we preserve a meta-level list in our memories. And yet, when it comes to lessons discovered, we count on persons in our organizations to perform believed a pile of lessons discovered reports in the hope that a key insight will leap out at them?
We have to have to come across approaches to package information into conveniently accessible “expertise assets” – structured with a client in thoughts.
The actions under are taken from the best-promoting fieldbook “Studying to Fly – Sensible know-how management from major and learning organisations”, written by Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell. They don’t demand sophisticated, bespoke technologies just a wilingness to believe-through and structure what has been learned.
1. Determine a buyer for this knowledge. Have a clear buyer – present or future – in mind when thinking about the creation of a understanding asset.
2. Get clear what your expertise asset is definitely about. What is the scope of your knowledge asset? A information asset desires to cover a precise location of organization activity.
3. Recognize a neighborhood of practice relating to this topic. The neighborhood will be the supply of the information initially, the users of the information in instant term, and the people today who have an on-going responsibility for validating the future contents of in the know-how asset. This is key ? or there is a real risk that you will finish up with an electronic time capsule – a snapshot in time of the way points applied to be done – rather than the existing, prized know-how in your organisation.
4. Collate any existing material upon which you can base your know-how asset and look for basic guidelines. Give some context so that persons can realize the goal and relevance of the knowledge asset. Are there basic recommendations that you can distil out of this material?
five. Build a checklist illustrated with examples and stories. The checklist must inform the user of the knowledge asset:
“What are the questions I require to ask myself?”
“What are the steps that I have to have to take?”
Illustrate it with examples, stories, pictures, digital photographs, models, quotes, video and audio clips if probable.
six. Consist of links to individuals. Produce a hyperlink to the person’s individual home web page or e-mail address wherever you mention them in the text. Involve a list of all the individuals with any connection with the content material. Use thumbnail photographs if you have them out there.
7.Validate the Recommendations Circulate the recommendations about the community once more, and ask “Do the guidelines accurately reflect your knowledge and practical experience?” “Do you have anything to add?”
eight. Publish the know-how asset. Shop the understanding in a space where it can be accessed by its community. Frequently this will mean the company intranet.
9. Initiate a feedback and ownership approach. Encourage feedback from users, so that they choose up and remove any invalid recommendations. Instil a sense of obligation that “if you use it, then you really should add to it”.
Over time, you are going to develop up a series of expertise assets which relate to the essential practices in your organisation ? the areas which can bring competitive benefit. The creation of these tangible information assets provides a concentrate for the communities of practice associated with each and every one, and in the end will give credibility to your understanding management efforts.