Lots of organizations have an strategy for identifying and recording lessons learned, probably as element of a post-project overview or similar procedure. Sadly, lessons learned reports have a tendency to finish up on a shelf gathering dust, or lost in the un-chartered corner of a fileserver somewhere. Let’s get true. How lots of people will truly trawl diligently through a quantity of lessons discovered documents in order to glean some essential point? The reality is, if you can motivate employees to initiate any type of “learning prior to undertaking” activity, then you?re performing quite nicely.
Remember the final time you packed your bag in preparation for a organization trip?
All those things you need to have to keep in mind? tickets, passport, currency, itinerary, get in touch with, driving license, energy adaptor, Ipod?
We manage to try to remember the things we want for our enterprise trips devoid of going through each previous suitcase-packing expertise in our minds, one by 1. Somehow, we maintain a meta-level list in our memories. And however, when it comes to lessons learned, we anticipate folks in our organizations to work believed a pile of lessons discovered reports in the hope that a important insight will leap out at them?
We require to locate ways to package know-how into effortlessly accessible “know-how assets” – structured with a consumer in thoughts.
The methods under are taken from the ideal-selling fieldbook “Understanding to Fly – Practical know-how management from top and learning organisations”, written by Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell. They don’t call for sophisticated, bespoke technologies just a wilingness to believe-through and structure what has been learned.
1. Determine a client for this know-how. Have a clear customer – present or future – in mind when thinking about the creation of a knowledge asset.
2. Get clear what your expertise asset is genuinely about. What is the scope of your information asset? A know-how asset demands to cover a specific region of business enterprise activity.
three. Determine Knowledge Management System of practice relating to this subject. The neighborhood will be the source of the knowledge initially, the customers of the expertise in quick term, and the individuals who have an on-going duty for validating the future contents of in the understanding asset. This is essential ? or there is a actual risk that you will finish up with an electronic time capsule – a snapshot in time of the way factors utilized to be performed – rather than the existing, prized know-how in your organisation.
four. Collate any current material upon which you can base your understanding asset and look for general recommendations. Provide some context so that people today can realize the purpose and relevance of the understanding asset. Are there general recommendations that you can distil out of this material?
five. Make a checklist illustrated with examples and stories. The checklist must tell the user of the expertise asset:
“What are the queries I need to ask myself?”
“What are the methods that I have to have to take?”
Illustrate it with examples, stories, photographs, digital photographs, models, quotes, video and audio clips if possible.
6. Consist of links to persons. Generate a hyperlink to the person’s individual house web page or e-mail address wherever you mention them in the text. Incorporate a list of all the men and women with any partnership with the content. Use thumbnail photographs if you have them readily available.
7.Validate the Guidelines Circulate the suggestions about the community once again, and ask “Do the suggestions accurately reflect your information and practical experience?” “Do you have something to add?”
8. Publish the information asset. Shop the information in a space where it can be accessed by its community. Usually this will mean the organization intranet.
9. Initiate a feedback and ownership method. Encourage feedback from customers, so that they choose up and do away with any invalid recommendations. Instil a sense of obligation that “if you use it, then you ought to add to it”.
More than time, you are going to build up a series of know-how assets which relate to the important practices in your organisation ? the regions which can bring competitive advantage. The creation of these tangible expertise assets supplies a concentrate for the communities of practice associated with each one, and in the end will give credibility to your information management efforts.
