Category: Knowledge Management

Posted on

Why am I training experts?

On the last few months I have been into a very special challenge. I have been given the task to train experts around their own work.

This is strange, as soon as they are the experts, and even if I know the subject in depth, they know it better, because they are the ones who really perform the work.

Around 5 years ago this company came to us with the task to understand what were the best practices around their global operations, in this case, project management. Their objective was to standardize their processes globally based on them.

They had an enormous quantity of projects being planned and implemented, but each region had a different standard to be followed, and the documents provided, even though fulfilling the requirements to go through their tollgate process, were not standardized. Basically, each project was presented in a different way.

This allowed huge quality variation among the information delivered, therefore, it was getting harder to streamline the decision making around which project of the portfolio was more fit to the company strategy.

At that point, I was invited to support an initiative that would gather all those project documents which were successful, and presented good quality throughout all company’s regions.

With good communication and stakeholder engagement plans, we were able to understand what they had in common, and create a list of what should be the minimal information to be supplied, and how was the better way to present it according to the company’s values, culture and expectations.

After getting this done, we were able to define templates and guidance documents to create a standard to be followed globally.

As it’s been done for more than five years now, even if the main objective remained, the scope of work for each phase of this initiative changed. Here is a summary of what was done so far:

  • Formed a team able to gather the information needed
  • Select best practices and understand what added value or not
  • Create templates based on used and successful documents
  • Validate and deploy template and guidance documents, providing examples
  • Determine and structure a centralized repository of knowledge, methodology, information and documents
  • Engage teams on using the new framework

This incredible transformation process has been implemented using several good practices around business analysis, project management, requirements elicitation, stakeholders engagement, change and knowledge management. There are many other side initiatives and next steps to this new environment that were created.

Now, the challenge is to keep the teams engaged and adherent to the new procedures implemented. Even if they are the experts and they know it better. I am happy to being able to explain the reasons they are using the tools provided, how they would be better used and how they relate to the current company’s policies.

Posted on

“Ah-ha!” moment

Today I was presented to an unconventional way to report about my learnings on an event. I was supposed to describe my “Ah-ha!” moments and why I had them.

This approach is about your discoveries, your “Eureka” moments, and seemed to be very well received by all the participants of the event. It made me rethink about my capacity of making every opportunity an “Ah-ha!” moment.

It is interesting because you can add more color to some facts that should seem secondary at a first glance, such as the behaviors and small attitudes you saw.

Sometimes we are so involved into our experience, that we don’t feel able to learn from others and see through their perspective. We forget that every opportunity may take a round “Ah-ha!” from our mouth!

We may already know what is being exposed to us. We know that so much that we already forgot how we started it, the difficulties we have gone through to make it as natural as it is right now.

But when we force ourselves to look at that experiences with a discovery perspective, and we remember all the effort we had. The “Ah-ha!” is stronger, because we learn again, and now with some background.

Now I am very glad to have learned and applied this new approach.

Looking forward to my next “Ah-ha!”

Posted on

Open Data equals Governmental Data?

Today I attended to an interesting event around open data. My expectations were around seeing how governments share their data, who is able to use it and at what extend.

My expectations were not wrong, but there was a plot twist in the end!

Overall, there is a pressure from the population to get good, reliable and current information.

We are not only talking about data analysts, scientists or these kind of people anymore, it is about the couples getting married and need to find a registered religious official (and yes, this is the most downloaded data from Ontario’s data service).

Now that the process of gathering data and providing open data is almost settled, the governmental open data sources are taking the next step by making all those raw data become something digestible, with charts, maps and even storytelling, directly from their source.

The challenges are big, and they worth it, as this is one of the ways to avoid governments to take unilateral decisions, and also promote individuals or companies to work with this data, and in this case, it doesn’t really matter if they are willing to have direct profit out of this.

If I stop my text here, it all makes sense, as we are talking about governments that do it all based on laws*.

Then there was this presentation of a vehicle tracking company, that has more than 3 million sensors installed, and they have a humongous set of information sitting idle there at their servers. They had this big idea, why not turning it a by-product** and open this to the great public, for free? It is not a new idea, and surely Google is the first, but not only, company that already does that successfully.

Why did I consider it as a plot twist? Because I was not expecting it and because they found a way to create value for their company through open data. That intangible asset was passive and now became active, growing their visibility to new and diverse markets that they wouldn’t be able to reach with their core business.

*The fact that it is something that governments must do, doesn’t decrease the value of the teams that perform it. It was amazing to see the excitement of the presenters around their work and around the new challenges they had ahead!

**All concerns regarding to privacy were answered during the presentation and can be explained by the company.