While “going agile” is not an end in itself, there are circumstances where an agile content strategy can help achieve desired business outcomes. In part 1 of this two-part blog series, we discuss content team implementation of agile ceremonies which have brought success to EK clients. In part 2, we’ll follow up with a discussion of traditional Scrum roles and how they can be applied to content teams.

Agile Content Team Ceremonies

More than just meetings, agile ceremonies are designed to empower teams by maximizing the investment of each team member’s time. Here are some examples in which EK has successfully employed agile ceremonies to empower content teams.

Content Sprint Planning

Anyone who’s ever worked on a content team knows that creating a prioritized content backlog is arguably the greatest value which agile can add to content strategy. Content tasks often come to content teams in a flurry of urgent requests and unrealistic timelines. Adding incoming requests to a product backlog and making that product backlog visible to stakeholders can go a long way towards setting realistic expectations for content production timelines.

Once the content backlog is established, sprint planning meetings provide an opportunity for content teams to engage in dialog with the product owner and discover the business objective, audience, and topic of content tasks.

In this example the product backlog consists of all tasks in the “To Do” column.

As with any sprint planning meeting, estimating the amount of effort it will take to accomplish each content task is essential. We’ve found simple metrics to estimate effort such as T-shirt sizes (small, medium, large, extra large) are helpful for non-technical teams like content teams. Reformatting that PDF to ensure it’s 508 compliant? That’s a small task. Producing that new user help video? That’s a large task.

Once T-shirt sizes are agreed to for each upcoming task you can chart the content team’s velocity. As with any agile team, ensure the team commits to a realistic amount of work for the sprint – based on their known velocity. But let’s be honest – it’s highly likely that a content team will be asked to take on more than they can realistically handle. It’s also highly likely that “urgent” tasks will be requested mid-sprint. Business stakeholders requesting urgent content tasks will have to be educated about new agile processes – and their business value.

Content Daily Stand-Up

Once a content team has committed to completing the tasks in the current sprint (the main outcome of the sprint planning meeting), daily stand-up meetings are essential to achieving this collaboratively set goal. The typical format is 15 minutes in which the entire team answers three questions:

• What did you complete since our last stand-up?
• What do you plan to work on today?
• Are there any roadblocks in your way?

Daily stand-ups are an opportunity for the entire team to explicitly commit to meeting the goals of the current sprint at the beginning of each day. This may mean dynamically adjusting tasks which are assigned to team members. If one team member has completed a first draft of a new publication, perhaps another team member can jump in and offer to review it and give feedback. If one team members is a stronger writer and is struggling with a visual design, they can ask for assistance. The focus of the daily stand-up is on the team working together to complete all of the tasks in the sprint, shifting tasks and offering expertise as needed to best make that happen.

Content Sprint Review

The focus of a development sprint review is to ensure that the goal of the sprint is met – often a final check against acceptance criteria. Usually, the team presents to the product owner. Content publication is usually not as technical and the business requirements are relatively easy to understand. An entire ceremony to validate that acceptance criteria are met is not as valuable for content teams.

For content teams, it is really easy for the completion of daily tasks to go unrecognized. Does anyone stop to take notice when a routine article is published? It’s not only large publication milestones that deserve recognition.

Sprint reviews in the form of “Demo Fridays” can be a good strategy to ensure that the work of your content producers is valued. Each member of the team has the opportunity to show off all new content which was published during the week. The ScrumMaster sets the tone here, and it should be celebratory, honoring tasks completed, noting attention to detail and quality, and acknowledging roadblocks overcome.

Content Sprint Retrospective

Sprint retrospectives cultivate the culture of continuous improvement which is so essential to content teams. Content production is a bit of an art, with an emphasis on soft skills like writing with style and clarity. These skills require continuous honing – there’s always more to learn.

The goal of a sprint retrospective is not to improve content production skills, but rather to improve the agile processes which enhance content production. However, the inclusion of sprint retrospectives in the processes of your content team models the continuous improvement which is so critical to the overall culture.

Recently a content team which worked with EK discovered and implemented a process improvement due to a retrospective. The content team was using Trello to manage content tasks and a subset of business stakeholders were uncomfortable with the platform. This was causing poor communication during the editorial process. These particular business stakeholders were creating a spreadsheet where each row was a task. Rather than force the business stakeholders to use Trello, the team revised their process to link from Trello to their stakeholders’ spreadsheet. The hybrid approach enabled more regular communication with the stakeholders, but still honored the content team’s processes.

Conclusion

Agile ceremonies are just one component of agile processes, but they are a highly visual and recognizable one. When people talk about “going agile,” they often default to agile software development, but agile ceremonies (and other agile practices) can empower many kinds of teams – including teams of content producers. Do you need help empowering your content teams with agile practices?  Contact us at Enterprise Knowledge – we can help.

In your organization, is there a distinct strategy behind the people side of your organizational change, or is there simply a collection of tactical communications or training activities that need to be “managed” during a rollout? Change leadership requires the courage of swimming upstream, often against the ingrained habits of your organization.

There is a difference between truly leading change and just managing it:

• Change Leadership: Executives and managers take a personal interest in the change project succeeding and unite people behind a common vision.
• Change Management: Relying on predetermined communications and training to meet behavioral change goals. While these tactics will undoubtedly be a part of every change plan, they are not enough to ensure adoption.

We often see this challenge in our knowledge management initiatives, where regular emails about a new collaboration tool do not lead to desired levels of adoption. Regardless, whether your organization is currently going through changes related to people, process, technology (or all at once), change leadership is crucial to success. Change leadership underlines the importance of the change and ensures appropriate resourcing and priority. Change leadership is also better suited to a complex, rapidly-changing environment, which reflects most organizations.

How to Lead Change

Don’t treat behavioral change like an afterthought. Many change practitioners are brought in right before a launch or even after a project has already failed once. This makes the job of encouraging adoption much more difficult: at EK we find that most people take time to process new changes and integrate them into their daily work – something that the change team may have already done because they were aware of the change sooner. This concept is especially true for difficult changes such as changing roles or organization structures. Leading change in this way means that the behavioral change required from people is a priority from the onset of the project.

Ensure sponsors show their dedication. Often, all change activities are delegated to external consultants or those within an organization who do not have influence on the direction of the change. While bringing in experts can greatly increase chances of high adoption, fully outsourcing change activities will undermine the change effort. It is crucial that people who have institutional trust and decisionmaking authority take on the role of sponsor and that they make a concerted effort to be involved, active voices throughout the change. An absent sponsor on a project where change is “managed” can make the people being asked to change feel like they have no say in the outcome and can exacerbate resistance.

Enable people to change, don’t force them. Sometimes leading change means adjusting an approach based people’s previously misunderstood needs. Making the change easier to digest with the help of the people involved is an evolving conversation. This requires less focus on dealing with people considered “troublemakers” and more on truly listening to and acting on people’s concerns – perhaps about user experience, unnecessary features, or institutional knowledge that is not being tapped in the change project. To create even more opportunities for people to change, you could try an iterative, or agile approach to rollout. This will help build trust as people’s input improves the technology, process, or organization structure after each iteration.

Are you managing change but not yet leading it in your organization? EK’s change management consultants can help you put together a strong change strategy. Contact us to learn more at info@enterprise-knowledge.com.

Our KM Consultants help organizations improve the way they capture, share, and reuse information. Many KM projects focus on managing unstructured information like documents, emails, and web pages. While this type of unstructured information is critical, it is not the full enterprise of an organization’s knowledge. What about databases, reports, and dashboards? To fully encompass an organization’s knowledge and information, both structured and unstructured information must be addressed. The most impactful Knowledge and Information Management approaches are those that not only cover both structured and unstructured information, but manage them together in an integrated manner. A well-defined ontology is a critical path to link structured (databases and reports) and unstructured information.

An organization that successfully links their structured and unstructured information through ontologies can see meaningful improvements in the findability and discoverability of their information. An ontology will create connection between all information, meaning that information becomes a web that may be traversed by your end users to better find and use the information they seek. This leads to greater productivity, collaboration, and overall satisfaction.

The easiest way to understand how ontologies can help link structured and unstructured information is through examples. This blog shares two different examples showing how an ontology can associate these two different types of content.

• Merging customer information with customer metrics
• Mining product information

Merging Customer Information with Customer Metrics

The Problem

A large financial services firm that worked primarily with corporate clients needed to integrate customer metrics into their customer intelligence portal. The portal was a central location for news and information about their customers to improve sales and account management. The content included formal customer documents (contracts, invoices and license agreements), news, and call notes. A separate data warehouse team had a database of key customer metrics. The firm wanted a way to show key metrics about a customer while people were reading news, documents, or call notes about that customer.

The Ontology Solution

The firm used their customer database to seed an ontology that included a customer entity type. Each customer entity was assigned attributes like industry, status, and customer number using information from the customer database. This list of customers and their attributes was loaded into an ontology management and entity extraction tool, like PoolParty. The entity extraction tool was run against the content repository to identify references to customers in the content. Once the entities were identified and tagged, the structured and unstructured information could be linked.

The portal content was organized by customer, industry, and topic. The customer and industry information comes from the ontology. When users look a document that mentions one of their customers, they also see metrics about the customer and their industry.

Mining Product Information

The Problem

A manufacturing company was looking to find patterns about product defects in order to improve the reliability of the products they manufacture. They had information in a variety of formats:

• A database of information about product defects and returns;
• Defect reports with problem descriptions; and
• User comments from their website.

The manufacturer needed a way to mine all of this information to identify patterns that would allow them to improve the way they manufactured their products.

The Ontology Solution

An ontology was the best way to link this content together for analysis. The manufacturer created an ontology that included the following entities:

• Products
• Parts
• Defects

Products store the name of the product, its SKU, and the unique identifier that can be used to link it back to the product database that contains the structured information. Parts include the name of the part, any similar names, and manufacturing information. The defects are a list of common problems that will grow as more information is captured.

The products were loaded into the ontology management tool with the SKU and product identifier so that they could be linked back to the database. We entered part information and common defects in the parts and class entities. Entity extraction was run against the unstructured content (defect reports, surveys, and social media). This allowed us to identify new defects and parts and associate them with the products aligned with the content.

The manufacturer was able to use SPARQL (an ontology query language similar to SQL) to see relationships between defects, parts, and products that were not easily visible before. Using SPARQL queries, the manufacturer was able to see that 2-3 parts that were used across the product line accounted for most of the defect descriptions. This information would not have been available without associating problem descriptions with defect and return information from their product database.

Conclusion

As you can see from these two examples, an ontology is a great way to link structured and unstructured information. Ontology products like PoolParty automate much of the process and make it an affordable and scalable solution. The next time you revisit your organization’s Knowledge Management capabilities do not limit yourself to documents and web pages. Use ontologies to integrate databases and reports so that you have a true Knowledge and Information Management (KIM) solution.

EK can help make the integration of your structured and unstructured information seamless. For more information contact us at info@enterprise-knowledge.com.

I recently ran a workshop for one of EK’s clients that was designed to discover, document, and then model how their internal social network (Yammer in this case) was running in their organization. The idea was to figure out if the company could use Yammer less organically and more deliberately for communication and collaboration.

The company is relatively new to social networks. They turned Yammer on about 7 months ago and initially just let it run, watching how employees used it without any real institutional encouragement. The result was about what you would expect: Pockets of “early adopters” established groups and began using the tool to connect with relatively small networks of employees. Its adoption was far from widespread and its impact on the organization was small. It wasn’t central to how the company worked or exchanged information.

About 3 months ago, the communications department took matters in hand and began to look seriously at how it could use Yammer as a more official – and more managed – internal communications and collaboration tool. They recognized that Yammer would continue as an organic collaboration tool among self-forming groups, but they wanted to do more. With EK’s help, the communications department took a step-by-step approach to institutionalizing and managing Yammer in the organization.

First, we provided an official channel for the CEO to post video and text messages to employees. Channeling CEO messaging and videos through Yammer provided an official endorsement of the tool and a ready and willing audience, namely all company employees.

Second, we embedded Yammer into their redesigned portal. We put each employee’s “My Feed” on the home page to balance traditional corporate communications content with more dynamic and personalized social posts.

Next, we developed an avatar in Yammer for employee communications. Posts in Yammer from “employee communications” rather than from a named individual added an official, institutional dimension to Yammer posts. In addition to the My Feed on portal home page, we embedded a Yammer user feed that displayed only posts from the employee communications avatar. This provided an announcement channel for the company that displayed both on the portal home page and on employees’ mobile devices via the Yammer app.

Finally, we ran the workshop to understand how all of these uses of Yammer – both organically created groups and more strategic uses – could come together in a unified way. During the workshop we charted Yammer along three dimensions:

• The various types of authors that post to Yammer (e.g. the CEO, company leadership, corporate communications, regional leadership, subject matter experts, project team members).
• The various types of messages posted by specific types of authors (e.g. organization announcements, stories and anecdotes, earnings reports, holiday greetings).
• The specific audiences each message type was directed toward (e.g. all company, project teams, regional groups, individual facilities, affinity groups)

The resulting interaction model gave a holistic view of how Yammer is used in the organization and how it could best be managed. By diagraming the model and communicating it throughout the company, employees now have a better idea of how to use their social network effectively. They know what types of groups to join, where to post various types of messages, and how the Yammer group that they just created fits into the overall collaboration network.

There are three key questions to ask when developing a Knowledge Management (KM) strategy: where are you, where do you want to be, and how do you ensure you get there successfully? These are the three pillars crucial for the development of a sound KM strategy. At Enterprise Knowledge (EK), we define these as the Current State, Target State, and Roadmap. As simple as these terms may sound, developing a complete understanding of each is no small challenge. In this white paper series, one of EK’s KM strategy experts, Yanko Ivanov, addresses the second step: developing the Target State Definition.

You’ve completed your Current State Assessment and you know exactly and in great detail where your organization is on the KM continuum. Now what? How do you determine where you want your organization to be in terms of KM capabilities? What is realistic? What is achievable?

Enter Target State Definition. At this point of the KM strategy effort, we define the what of the Target State, while we address the how during the Roadmap step.

By now, having a comprehensive understanding of the Current State, you should have spotted some recurring themes across the organization. For example, a common issue we often discover is lack of trust in the enterprise search tool, if one exists. The causes for that are usually multi-faceted and are rarely due to technology issues alone. As we discussed previously, a comprehensive KM strategy touches on much more than just technology. It is vastly unique for each organization. In order to define a practical, realistic, and sustainable Target State, at EK we approach this task in a manner similar to the Current State Assessment. More specifically, we do that by diving into each of the five aspects: people, processes, content, culture, and of course, technology. These aspects are closely related and we develop them in sync by following several key steps:

• We start by assessing the strengths and weaknesses revealed in the current state map.
• We then balance those against the perceived business needs and wants by determining the areas that would have the biggest business impact with lowest costs.
• Next, we further focus our discussions and explorations on these areas with the greatest need and greatest interest.
• Finally, we address the organization’s needs and wants with our best practices experience in KIM to develop an effective and achievable solution that the organization can maintain and grow for the long term.

Working through the above steps, we focus on areas where we have found the greatest potential impact. Below are examples of some of these areas for each of the five aspects:

1. People

As one of the critical pieces for knowledge development and retention, it is important to define a clear target for the human capital of the organization. That includes topics like these:

• Target level of thought leadership in the organization. Based on the established goals of the organization, we leverage our experience with similar organizations in that industry to recommend the level of staff coaching, development, and training to establish an optimal degree of thought leadership without it negatively impacting productivity.
• Extent and nature of collaboration. Influenced by your organization’s line of business, collaboration among staff can be achieved in various ways. Here we define the type and level of collaboration that would be most valuable to your organization.
• Target level of processes and systems adoption. While it may be tempting to simply state a 100% adoption rate, that may not be reasonable or even needed depending on the organizational needs and environment.
• Balance between content accessibility and confidentiality protection. Having analyzed the types of content through the Current State Assessment, we bring our experience with securing content to define roles and access permissions levels to achieve that balance depending on the organization, type of work, and industry.

With a clear picture of what your employees need, how you see their involvement and knowledge management capabilities, it will be easier to form a targeted and achievable roadmap for developing your staff and meeting their KM needs.

2. Processes

As previously discussed, understanding your current processes can identify gaps in data, capabilities, and knowledge acquisition. As part of the Target State, we define which gaps or weaknesses should be addressed. Some areas we consider:

• Process optimization and automation. Here we define potential process areas where optimization and automation would bring the most impact to efficiency. A straightforward example here is aiding and simplifying data flow from one system to another, thus eliminating manual data entry and potential for errors.
• “Unofficial” processes. There are often “unofficial” process steps needed for staff to complete a task. We consider these gaps and which steps to formally include in the organization processes.
• Process adoption. We also evaluate processes that are not being followed, and, depending on the reason, determine whether they should be preserved, improved, or deprecated.
• New processes. New processes, as needed, to improve knowledge acquisition and retention. For instance, capturing and sharing all points of contact with a client.

Understanding the current gaps and weaknesses in processes and data and defining your targets are crucial elements to the next step, developing the KM Roadmap. There we define how and when we will achieve these process improvement targets.

3. Content

Having performed the content analysis piece of the Current State Assessment, we now have a solid understanding of potential gaps in the quality, availability, security, and freshness of content. Here is a sample of critical topics we address in the Target State content strategy:

• Information integration. Here we define the information sources that should be integrated and to what level. There could be valid points in keeping certain data segregated, while integrating all other sources. Here, having understood the “why” of existing silos, we can accordingly tackle breaking down the appropriate barriers. And again, this could touch multiple aspects: people (organizational), culture, or technology. We addressed the people aspect above. From an organizational perspective, we look at business unit content and to what extent it is needed throughout other business units. And on the technology side, we recommend potential tools that can index or integrate various content sources and silos.
• Content confidentiality and access. Similar to the point we made in the people aspect above, here we define the content types and sources that should be protected and to what level. This is where a unified user profile and an enterprise-wide access control plan come into play. You do not need to develop the access control plan in detail right now, but you should plan for it as one of the first tasks in the KM strategy roadmap, which we will discuss in the next white paper in this series.
• Content enrichment. After planning for the basics of managing your content, we consider the specific benefit of tools and methodologies for enhancing your content and relationships between various pieces with metadata, concept recognition, linking to related concepts, etc. Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and semantic web concepts are quickly improving and gaining popularity. Implementing an advanced tool with machine learning capabilities could vastly improve your search engine power, ability to automatically identify and suggest semantically related content, and of course introduce features like content auto-tagging, dynamic faceting, smart search auto-complete, etc. While the “how” will be addressed in the Roadmap, here we only need to determine what your Target State looks like.

These are but a few topics we consider when developing your content strategy for the Target State. A few others that we explore include knowledge retention practices when staff leaves, internal and external collaboration spaces and management, and backup and recovery capabilities.

4. Culture

Like we discussed in the first paper in this series, company culture shapes how staff perceives and manages organizational knowledge and information. If sharing knowledge and fostering thought leadership are areas that need to be improved, here we define what they look like in your Target State. To help build the cultural aspect of the Target State, we consider these:

• The “What’s in it for me?” factor that hinders sharing. Here we define the need, type, and level of incentives and potential process tweaks to address such sentiment. Would compensation incentives and rewards work for your organization? If so, what is the cost vs benefit? Conversely, we explore whether thought leadership could be included as part of the performance expectations for certain roles. This is where you need to be creative as one size certainly does not fit all.
• The “I don’t know where/how/what to share and who can see it” factor. In a previous example we mentioned how multitude of systems with overlapping functionalities can actually be a detriment to content contribution and sharing. Additionally, not all content may be shareable with all staff. Touching on access control again, we define what needs to be done to enforce it and communicate it. Employees need to be comfortable with the security of their content for content contribution and sharing to be fostered.
• The leadership support factor. In our experience, active leadership support is a critical requirement for implementing and maintaining a cohesive and effective KM strategy. With that in mind, in the Target State we define methods that should be implemented to strengthen leadership support for KM processes and tools and to foster knowledge sharing among staff. Some common examples, recognition of thought leaders, budgetary support for information systems implementation, administration, and governances, upholding established content management processes, etc.

The success of any technical solution is highly dependent on the human and culture factor in an organization. Leadership support and guidance is critical for the adoption of enterprise processes and technology. Thus, for your KM strategy to succeed, it must consider enterprise culture and provide methods for actively fostering confidence in the available KM tools as well as trust in the shared information.

5. Technology

By now, you’ve probably noticed that while technology is integrated in the above aspects of the KM strategy, it is simply an enabling factor to allow you to achieve better knowledge management. Various tools can address different gaps in the above categories, but how do they all fit together?

At EK, when considering the technology aspect of a KM strategy, we define the information and technical architecture for the organization. We take into consideration any constraints that have already been established and architect the technology ecosystem that will support the targets defined in the above categories. To do that, some of the factors we consider include:

• Company IT capabilities. Is there a dedicated IT staff and do they have development capabilities? How comfortable is the organization with customizing tools and platforms, building custom linkages between tools, or even building custom tools? Many platforms nowadays provide out of the box integration functionality that allows them to work well with each other. However, that is not always the case and depending on the set targets, there may be the need for custom development.
• Preferred technology stack. We consider existing technologies and preferences, e.g. Microsoft or open source, in order to eliminate clashing tools in the Target State.
• Existing technology ecosystem and integration capabilities. An important factor we keep in mind are the already existing tools and platforms and their integration capabilities, for example any available APIs. To develop a practical and cost effective Target State, we focus on leveraging the best of the tools that already exist and ensuring path to integration, thus trending toward less systems rather than more.
• Technology biases. An issue we’ve encountered in some situations is a bias toward or against a specific technology due to past or present issues. Business users may have had a bad experience with a specific platform. Such cases should be taken into consideration even though, with some configuration and customization, that platform may still be a viable solution.
• User management. Here we define, for example, whether it is beneficial for the organization to implement an enterprise-wide user account management solution and how single sign-on can be achieved. We also consider whether implementing a universal, searchable employee profile would address some of the high priority needs of the organization.
• Enterprise search. If there isn’t a solid enterprise search solution already in place, we define the viability and level of implementation of one to reach as many data sources as possible. Most platforms provide their built in search engines and certain integration capabilities. However, it is worth considering a dedicated search engine tool with much more powerful capabilities and integration options.
• Advanced technologies. Depending on the maturity level of the organization in all aspects, cutting edge tools like semantic web and machine learning/AI could truly take enterprise knowledge to the next level with content augmentation, auto tagging, concept identification and linking, and so on.  

All these considerations can quickly become overwhelming when one attempts to achieve it all in one go. At EK, we utilize our proven approach of breaking it up in manageable iterations to provide quick value and continuous improvement throughout the implementation effort. We will address methods to alleviate the burden and ease the transition in the next white paper focused on developing the Roadmap.

Benchmarking

Having constructed the Target State vision, we revisit the Current State benchmarks we established earlier for each of the categories relevant to the organization. With that in mind, we then help the organization envision the impacts of achieving the defined Target State in each of these categories. For instance, an organization we worked with recently had scored a 2 (out of 5) in the Search category for its Current State due to their multiple and segmented search capabilities. Understanding their actual search needs, leveraging the strengths of their existing platforms, and applying our proven enterprise search best practices, we helped the organization score a 5 in that category. By implementing the recommended integrated enterprise search that indexes critical content and produces accurate results with an intuitive interface, we helped the organization increase user confidence, enthusiasm, and willingness to share. 

Utilizing the KIM maturity model, we can clearly visualize the intended improvement in the various aspects included in the benchmark. Each node in our benchmark scale depicts the state of the specific KIM capability which allows us to easily show the impact and level of improvement that the Target State could achieve for that capability. This in itself is a powerful tool to help obtain executive buy-in and support for the implementation phase.

Concluding Remarks

While there are three distinct steps in developing a KM strategy, namely Current State, Target State, and Roadmap, they all evolve hand in hand. While you work on understanding your Current State, you already start forming an idea for the Target State. And while defining the Target State, you unavoidably think of how to achieve it, i.e., the Roadmap. In our next white paper in this series, we will discuss our guiding principles in developing a detailed, customized and practical KM Roadmap to help you achieve your Target State.