New Agora

A great piece of investigative reporting from Bob Lewis. He discovered the Loch Ness Monster a SAP implementation project that finished ahead of schedule by the Japanese company Daiwa House Industry.

The lessons are entirely relevant to any complex project implementation.

Dave Snowden has come up with a lot of complex and interesting ideas over the years, but often mixed up in a way that makes it difficult to tease out the individual strands.

However, a recent blog post is an excellent summary of his current state of thinking and is well worth a read. But from this and by chasing down the relevant originating blog posts, here is a summary:

The benefits of KM are:

Sometimes I stumble across ideas that are so useful and simple that I wonder why they aren't globally known. The SPIKES protocol taught to medical students as an effective and compassionate way to break bad news falls into this category:

S: set up the interview
P: assess the patient's perception
I: obtain the patient's invitation
K: provide the knowledge
E: address the patient's emotions
S: establish a treatment strategy

Organisational work can be broadly classed into four categories:

• Process – work that needs to be completed in a defined manner to ensure consistency and repeatability, eg call centers, surveying, project management reporting.
• Practice – work that requires people to use their judgement to determine the appropriate method of completing a particular task.
• Discovery – innovative work that extends the range of available solutions within a field through invention or research.
• Management – oversight and ongoing improvements of organisational work undertaken

Each type of work requires a different approach to staff retention:

Bob Lewis has written an excellent column on the benefits of generalists (as opposed to specialists) for work that involves practices rather than processes. Bob's talking about software development, but the principles he espouses are broadly applicable to the modern enterprise:

Bob Lewis is an IT columnist who I find consistently worth reading because of his clear and dispassionate insight into how organisational politics really works.

He is the ultimate pragmatist, with a low tolerance for cheap insights and bullshit. So I was pleased to see that he recently finished reading Chasing the Rabbit by Steven Spear and found it worthwhile.

Is telecommuting a Knowledge Management issue? On the face of it, it would seem not. Surely it's just a technical question of plugging router A into slot B and typing password C.

But it's not that simple. As anyone who has ever worked for a multi-site company knows, those at the smaller, remote sites can easily feel excluded from the decision making process that goes on at Head Office. And really, what is telecommuting but an office of one?

When I first switched from a technical role to a management-level position, I found myself struggling with an unfamiliar vocabulary. More unexpectedly, I found that I wasn't able to write documents in a way which was suitable for the purposes of upper-level management.

Strategies, policies and other management planning tools need to communicate more than just short-term implementation details, but clearly convey long-term implications and a sense of how the documents fit into the broader picture of the organisation.

The Balanced Scorecard is a common tool used to measure the success of a strategy. It is normally a whole-of-organisation tool, but can also be used to articulate how progress will be measured for an individual strategy.

Balanced scorecards emphasize the idea that if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. A typical Balanced Scorecard consists of four stages:

• articulating your strategy

A charter or terms of reference (TOR) document outlines a basis for the exercise of authority by a group. The group may be an existing team, or specially formed for the purposes of fulfilling the charter or TOR.

The two terms are often interchangeable. However, terms of reference is more appropriate for a group that is responsible for reviewing and monitoring, whereas a charter is more appropriate for a team charged with actually executing a project.