Professional Service firms are facing a number of major competitive challenges including price-down pressures from clients, accelerated by the 2008 financial crash, deregulation in some markets (such as the UK and Australian legal sectors), increasing competition from lower cost economies (such as IT services from India) and new internet-enabled business models (such as Freelancer.com in IT and design services, Crunch.co.uk in accountancy and RocketLawyer.com in legal services).

In response to these challenges, firms are increasingly recognising the need to innovate both in the services they provide and in their ways of working, to increase value to clients whilst reducing cost of delivery. A key opportunity in all professional service firms is in process-based innovation, applying techniques such as waste elimination, standardisation and right-skilling to reduce cost and improve service. This requires firms to establish and operate a systematic approach to assessing the performance of their services (for example a Due Diligence service from a law firm, an Audit service from an accountant or an internal support process such as Invoicing) and to use this information to identify and execute process improvements. And there is major opportunity for improvement – my own experience in process innovation projects¹ in major UK law firms, is that a 25-45% reduction in the direct cost of performing the service (and as much as 75% on one occasion) can be achieved. In addition there is opportunity for enabling revenue increase through improved value and service to clients. So this is an area of significant opportunity for firms.

Process management is key to service innovation

However to realise these benefits on an ongoing basis (rather than in the occasional consulting-led project) firms need to develop internal capabilities in ‘process management’, a discipline that is well established in industry with its roots in work study and more recently in Lean thinking. But this discipline is typically absent in much of services as noted in a 2006 EU report on service innovation:

‘Analysis of services innovation suggests that often services do not capitalise on on-the-job innovations: the knowledge established during service production and delivery is not "captured” and “reproduced” in successive innovations.’² This resonates with my own experience and I have found that the common reasons for firms being ineffective in process learning are:

• There is often cultural resistance to systemization of their work, especially in ‘traditional’ sectors such as law and accounting.
• Fee earners are not motivated to take time to perform post-matter analysis and capture resulting learning – it is not typically chargeable and thus does not count towards their chargeable time targets.
• Firms lack the systems and resources for process innovation to enable the capture, codification and deployment of such ‘on-the-job’ innovations.
• Firms are often heavily siloed around content areas (for instance in law firms, teams in Employment, Commercial, Real Estate and Personal Injury) and so will have little cross-fertilisation in learning.

The result of this that every day professional service firms are effectively flushing knowledge down the drain, as they are not capturing or using process knowledge.

Knowledge-driven systemization in expert-based work

A good example of the effective use of the use of knowledge to improve systemization of work in an expert culture is from Intermountain Healthcare³.
Intermountain Healthcare is a not-for-profit healthcare provider in Utah and Idaho in the USA, managing 22 hospitals and employing 33,000 people at the time of writing. Its clinical outcomes are among the best in the USA whilst it is able to operate at much lower costs than many competitors. This performance is based on a long term best practice programme run between 1995 and 2005.

The key element in Intermountain’s best practice system is the Care Process Model (CPM). This is a file which covers all steps of care for a particular type of case from Admission to Discharge and beyond. It assembles best practice in the form of flow diagrams, Decision Support tools, Practice guidelines and management information. The CPM is a collaborative endeavour, and is constantly updated as new ideas evolve.  Doctors use the CPMs as a default but can always override them if they see fit. Over 60 CPMs are now in use in the hospital group covering cases such as insulin dosing, treatment of pneumonia and lung disease.

A new Director of Research was the trigger for the programme, seeing the opportunities for improvement by capturing and sharing best practices and establishing a fact-based culture. CPMs were introduced slowly never undermining doctor’s autonomy. The philosophy as defined by the Director was:

“We are not trying to control doctors but to get the doctors to control the system”. This was a key philosophy in gaining the engagement of doctors in an expert culture, relying on inherent evidence-based peer pressure to change professional behaviours.

Clinicians from all the hospitals meet regularly to review evidence of outcomes and to agree changes to CPMs. A culture of openness has developed. Auxiliary workers can question and suggest improvements to the CPM without problems of authority.

The benefits of the formalisation of best practice were dramatic. A study in 2008 by the Institute for Health Care Delivery Research concluded that the aggregate cost savings from improved clinical performance totalled $100 million a year.

This type of ‘evidence-based’ peer pressure can be applied in professional service firms to drive improvement.

In Part 2, I will explore how Knowledge Management can play a key role to support the application of process management practices in professional service firms.

During a time of budget cuts you might be called upon to explain why Knowledge Management shouldn’t be axed.  What do you say?

Justifying why Knowledge Management is essential to your organization can be a difficult task.  However, failure to gain managerial and executive support for KM is a frequent cause of KM initiative and program failures.  To effectively justify the importance of KM, focus on the end results of KM:  operation efficiency, risk reduction, and competitive advantage through innovations.

In explaining the rationale for Knowledge Management, practitioners sometimes make the mistake of focusing on intermediate tactics.  When asked by leadership, “why is KM essential to our success,” KM practitioners might be tempted to cite the intermediate goals of KM such as employee engagement, community building and cutting across organizational boundaries.

While engagement and community building are valuable to an organization, they are the means for attaining higher goals.  Communities of practice cost time and resources and are not themselves an end goal.  All KM efforts must produce a return on investment outside of the intermediate goods KM produces like communities of practice, engagement of employees, and organizational unity.

Similarly, Knowledge Management buzz-phrases like “learning management,” “lessons learned,” “best practices,” and “benchmarking” are tactical means to an end and not the ultimate aim of companies. These KM byproducts exist solely because they support higher-level goals.  If these are cited as the primary rationale for sustaining a KM program, the program is much more likely to be axed when an organization’s “core goals” are in jeopardy.

Effectively communicating the value of KM means showing management and leadership that KM delivers cost savings through efficiency or risk reduction.  It also means showing how KM can increase earnings through innovations.  So how does one communicate the value of KM?

Try sharing the rationale for KM using simple, plain language.  You might try something like:

“Knowledge Management is an essential line of defense in our company because it ensures that we don’t waste expenditures repeating the same mistakes or inefficiently reinvent the wheel in our key projects.  On top of that, KM is our company’s strongest line of offense – the end result of sharing our knowledge is innovation. Nothing drives our success like the competitive advantage derived from innovation.”

To further bolster the case for KM, there is no better rationale than hard data and statistics.  By ensuring that your KM key metrics and performance indicators are carefully chosen and monitored, you will have evidence to support the case for keeping KM.

By effectively communicating KM verbally and backing-up those claims with data, the case for supporting KM in times of budget cuts can be clearly communicated to leadership.  Leadership will be much more hesitant to cut a KM program if they understand KM in terms of efficiency, protection from risks, and competitive advantage from innovation.

Across the spectrum of the Knowledge and Information Management services offered by Enterprise Knowledge, one of the common themes of late has been the design and development of knowledge bases for helps desks and call centers.  We’ve all heard the phrase that content is king, recognizing that knowledge and information management systems are only as good as the information within them.  This is especially true for knowledge bases, where getting quick access to a complete set of meaningful “answers” is directly related to customer satisfaction and end user service.

There are many aspects to the design and implementation of knowledge bases that will determine return on investment and overall success and adoption.  In our experience, the below are the most critical best practices to ensuring the appropriate information is captured and enhanced, ensuring your organization’s knowledge will be used and reused by those who need it.

Make it Easy

Through our many knowledge gathering activities at organizations around the world, we consistently hear that one of the greatest impediments to information sharing is that it is too hard to load information into the systems at hand.  Often times, this is an issue with poor user interface design or overly complex workflows.  Knowledge bases must be designed and configured to allow information to easily flow into them.  We often use email as a comparison for this:  It should be simpler and faster to load a piece of information into a knowledge base than it would be to send an email with an attachment.

There are several means to support ease of information sharing.  As mentioned above, one is user interface design and related content “uploading” functionality.  Creating a simple “drag-and-drop” type of interface will help users easily upload content.  Ensuring the process to upload content is simple and straightforward, requiring as few clicks or manual entry of information will help minimize the time and complexity of information uploading.
 
Make it Rich

Well-designed knowledge bases also offer significant opportunities to improve the state of content and enrich it to be easier to find and manage.  One way to achieve this is to ensure that knowledge base designs and systems go beyond text to allow for the inclusion of images, videos, logical decision flows, and integrated functionality.  If a picture is worth a thousand words, a succinct video from an organizational expert is worth a million.  When designing your knowledge base, think beyond text to support the capture, management, and findability of a wide range of media in an integrated fashion.

Your knowledge base content can also be enriched with metadata tags to support its findability and discoverability.  This is especially important for non-text content, but is important for all.  Designing an easy to use and intuitive business taxonomy and applying it to all your content will support faceted navigation and the discovery of related content on key topics.

Of course, it is incumbent on knowledge base designers to ensure metadata can be applied quickly to support the aforementioned need for easy publishing.  There are three primary options for this:

    1.    If you are applying metadata manually and asking your business users to apply it, focus on the one or two most valuable fields that won’t take undue time or consideration to apply.
    2.    Consider leveraging supporting staff and a concise content governance plan to own the metadata application process, taking the onus off the business users.
    3.    Explore the use of automated metadata tools to speed and simplify the metadata application process.
Overall, a hybrid approach with all three of these options is typically the ideal but there are many permutations that can work.  For a more in depth discussion of ways to simplify metadata management see our blog “Six ways to Simplify Metadata Management.”
 
Embed it in the Business

Like any knowledge or information management system, a knowledge base should exist as one component within an integrated enterprise.  Defining the processes, technical integration points, and related governance between systems will help to ensure meaningful content consistently gets captured within the knowledge base.

Integrating your knowledge base with other knowledge and information systems provides easier means of information sharing.  For example, EK recently helped a client integrate their existing social platforms and content management system with their new knowledge base to allow key content to “flow” into the knowledge base with one click.  Now, select users can easily share their knowledge through a range of means, ensuring that it is captured for others to leverage and enhance
 
Provide Value-Added Constraints

Many organizations make a mistake of overly constraining the means by which information flows into a knowledge base, who’s allowed to publish into knowledge bases, or what types or formats of information may be placed within the knowledge base.  Overly constrained systems tend to choke.  At the same time, “Wild West” systems that allow anyone to load anything in any place will quickly run out of control, diluting the most valuable information to the extent that finding it will be like looking for a needle in a haystack, with an additional haystack getting dumped on top of the pile every few months.
Organizations have to endeavor to provide value-added constraints that walk the line between overly loose and overly tight governance models.  Simple workflow that provides quick content editing and metadata enrichment is great, but overly complex workflows that delay the publication of content must be avoided.  Equally, clear definition of article types and development of templates for consistently formatted content is a huge value-add, as long as it is designed with involvement from the business users to ensure the right article types are defined and the templates actually meet the business needs.
 
Support Evolution

Knowledge and knowledge systems, like the business itself, will die if they don’t continuously evolve.  As discussed above, content governance and supporting processes are critical to ensuring good information is consistently captured and enhanced within the system.

Smart application of technology also plays an important role.  For instance, we recently worked with one of our customers to design a two-tier knowledge base.  Official content that has gone through established content governance reviews is the anchor of the knowledge base, but working content in the form of collaborative blogs serves to support the evolution of the system.  The call center agents are empowered to use their time in between calls to create or edit working content, which is then reviewed by content reviewers and “graduated” as official content following review and approval.  This two-tier process makes the best use of agent time and knowledge, content processes, and supporting technologies.  It holds the added value of elevating call center agent responsibilities and giving them the welcome responsibility to enhance their own tools by sharing their expertise.
 
Listen to Your End Users

Along with the evolution of content, organizations must focus on understanding and serving the needs of their end users.  Ideally, this can be accomplished through a combination of active and passive means.  Active engagement will include polling your call center agents or providing them with technical means to report on commonly asked questions or topics and potentially engaging your end users directly to understand their satisfaction with the knowledge base, the topics they care about, and the areas they wish for more depth of content.  Passive monitoring will focus on knowledge base system metrics including common search terms, most popular content and topics, and navigational paths of users.

With a combination of Active and Passive metrics, organizations will have the means to focus their knowledge crtion on the topics that are most important to their users.  This also requires an active governance model and an investment in knowledge capture to ensure the evolution of content discussed above.
 
Reward Participation

Finally, the most successful knowledge base efforts will be those where content creators and contributors are rewarded for their efforts.  There is any number of means to do this.  This may simply mean identifying the most active or most valued contributors or providing them simple incentives.  One organization with whom EK works decided to reward additional hours of paid leave each month for the MVP content contributors.  Another provides gift cards each quarter.  Yet another took a much more advanced view of content contribution and created a gamification model that includes knowledge base content contribution as one of 10 factors that figured into bonuses and promotions.  Regardless of the specifics, content contribution should be celebrated and rewarded within an organization.

Getting the right knowledge into your knowledge base, and offering supporting processes and technologies to ensure this continues to happen over time is a key factor for success of your systems over time.  Whether you’re designing a new knowledge base or seeking to improve the value of an existing system, EK is poised to help by providing the strategic guidance, design, and implementation services necessary for success.  Contact us to learn more.

       If you ask 100 Knowledge Management experts how to effectively implement and practice KM, you really do get close to 100 different answers.  I believe this is because there isn’t one right answer.   I believe that we should consider that before we go into looking at maturity models and k-strategies that we must attend to and address how people in our organization feel and how we engage with each other.   A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of meeting John Stepper.   John has written about ways to help people work and share knowledge by helping us understand that we each have a personal responsibility to help each other.    At the core of John’s message lives a theme around choice.   We have a choice on how we behave and respond to others.   We have a choice to help others and share our knowledge.    Here is a link to John’s blog.

So now, when someone asks me “What’s Working Out Loud”?, here’s what I say:

“Working Out Loud starts with making your work visible in such a way that it might help others. When you do that – when you work in a more open, connected way – you can build a purposeful network that makes you more effective and provides access to more opportunities.”

Making your work visible: As Bryce described, this is indeed the fundamental starting point for working out loud.
Making work better: One of the main reasons for openly narrating your work is to find ways to improve it. You’re publishing so other people will see it, including some who can provide useful feedback, connections, or other things that will make your work better.
Leading with generosity: By framing your posts as contributions – as opposed to, say, efforts at self-promotion or personal branding – you’re more likely to engage other people. You’re not just looking for help but offering to help others, too. As Keith Ferrazzi said, “The currency of real networking is not greed but generosity.”

Building a social network: As you work out loud over time, you’ll be interacting with a broader range of people. The further you develop relationships with people in your network, the more likely it will be that you’ll collaborate with them and that they’ll be willing help you in other ways.
Making it all purposeful: Finally, since there’s an infinite amount of  contributing and connecting you can do, you need to make it purposeful in order to be effective. (Goals might be as simple as “I want more recognition in my firm.” or “I’d like to explore opportunities in another industry or location.”) You can still have plenty of room for serendipity, but having a goal in mind focuses your learning, your publishing, and your connections.

Starting with Respect

Author: Barbara Richman
Organization: HR Mpact states

If each employee develops an awareness of respectful behaviors and necessary skills, it is anticipated that employees will serve as role models and that these behaviors will spread in the workplace and beyond.  The following are ten tips to assist you in accomplishing this objective:

• Before acting, consider the impact of your words and actions on others.
• Create an inclusive work environment.  Only by recognizing and respecting individual differences and qualities can your organization fully realize its potential.
• Self-monitor the respect that you display in all areas of your communications, including verbal, body language, and listening.
• Understand your triggers or “hot buttons.”  Knowing what makes you angry and frustrated enables you to manage your reactions and respond in a more appropriate manner.
• Take responsibility for your actions and practice self-restraint and anger management skills in responding to potential conflicts.
• Adopt a positive and solution-driven approach in resolving conflicts.
• Rely on facts rather than assumptions.  Gather relevant facts, especially before acting on  assumptions that can damage relationships.
• Include others in your focus by considering their needs and avoiding the perception that you view yourself as the “center of the universe.”
• View today’s difficult situations from a broader (big picture) and more realistic perspective by considering what they mean in the overall scheme of things.
• “Each one influence one” by becoming a bridge builder and role model for civility and respect. Act in a manner whereby you respect yourself, demonstrate respect for others, and take advantage of every opportunity to be proactive in promoting civility and respect in your workplace.

http://www.lorman.com/resources/ten-tips-for-creating-respect-and-civility-in-your-workplace-15463

There is a saying that we only have one chance for a first impression.   I believe this is true but I don’t think it stops there.   Even if we made a good first impression, our relationship and interaction depends on what we do next.   All of the listed behaviors above can only be effective if we make a choice.    Choosing to behave as indicated takes a lot of energy.    In order to practically apply these behaviors, we must first realize that there is a cost upfront.   I haven’t read anywhere about this but I have experienced it.   Just because you make a choice to be civil doesn’t mean that people around you will make the same choice.   I have found in my own experience that have to spend time explaining to people why I am choosing to behave or respond to them in a certain way.   It does amaze me sometimes that it appears we have lost something of ourselves due to different forms of psychological distance    Our relationships have become more abstract and how we interact with others is less personal and more disconnected.   If we look at each other through the lens of an Iphone or email, we as people become something less than a person.   As we continue to move in the next generation of electronic connectedness, we are allowing our human connectedness to slip away. One example may be the commodity based or flexible workforce.   Why do I want or need to know Howie if he will only be here for a short time?    Another aspect is that we as workers have a clear affirmation that we are only a line item on a spreadsheet.

The Connection

If we are simply a line item on a spreadsheet why does any of this matter?

Have you ever used http://www.ancestry.com/?  I went to the library a few months ago and looked up people from my family history.   The only thing I could find was their names on a list.  It was a handwritten list from the census.  I could barely read the handwriting but I could see the names of my great grandparents or so I thought.   The generations that came before me are not even known to me and the people who are closest in terms of generation are just names on a list.   At the end of the day,  we are really names on a list.  If we allow that to rule over us and govern our behavior, we close the door to our experiences in the moment.  The connection is that we have a choice and it goes back to John Stepper.   We can choose to keep information to ourselves hoping that hoarding will help us personally or we can recognize that we are part of something bigger.  We are part of a network and we are connected to each other in ways that we can only discover through sharing and openness.  Our knowledge strategies must include an understanding and practice in sharing behaviors.   Our underlying objective should be that we become so good at sharing that there is no need for people to help facilitate sharing activities in that it happens naturally.   At the end of the day we all share a common end but we have a choice on how we behave and how we feel along the way.

Final Thought

A recent PBS documentary called This Emotional Life talks about happiness.   Something to consider based on the research is that approximately 50% of our happiness comes from our genetics, 10% comes from environment and 40% comes from choice.   What this means to me is that if we choose to respect each other and we choose to be kind and we choose to share and we choose to be happy, the moments of our lives will be rich and overall more pleasurable and full.

Before you go … please take a look at this (Happy)

Last month, I was on a two week trip to Italy; a week in Sardinia and a week in Rome. After several flight cancellations due to a fire at the Rome airport, I arrived 9 hours late but safely at my first destination in Cagliari Sardinia. My suitcase did not.

I now faced the prospect of traveling for at least the first of the two weeks in the clothes I arrived in--a pair of pants, tank top, black sweater, and sandals. (Lesson learned for future: take their advice—find room to pack a change of clothes in your carry-on.)

In the big scheme of things, losing luggage is a very minor inconvenience. And it can easily suck the enjoyment out of the trip when dealing with an airline system seemingly designed to be as customer-unfriendly as possible, in another language, in another culture.

In my 'old' self, I would want action and decisiveness and try to regain as much control as I could. I would have been anxious, frustrated, and angry. And I know it would have been hard for me to put those feelings aside to do what I really came to Italy for--enjoying the food and the friends I was there to meet.

Now was a good time to kick in all the EQ I preach about to others and see if it makes a difference. Here are the five EQ competencies I called on to help me manage this situation:

1. Emotional Self-Awareness.Yea, losing my luggage sucked. Acknowledged. AND I was in Italy and how fantastic is that? I didn't deny the frustration; I just made sure it wasn't front and center of every day.I gave it a few minutes thought when I checked in at the front desk for any status, and then focused on enjoying the rest of the day.

2. Interpersonal Relationships. To keep my mind off the challenge of living in the same clothes day after day, I turned my attention to the others in my group engaging them in stories about their life. I focused on deeply listening and enjoying their company. I had nothing to worry about except what was right there right now.

3.Reality Testing. What is irreplaceable? The time I am spending with this group of new friends. Clothes and shoes can be replaced. And in reality, what can I do about it? Choosing to give up control gave me the space to immerse myself in each experience.

4. Stress Tolerance. This was a big one. 15 minutes of clearing my mind with meditation in the morning calmed the underlying anxiety and helped me set an intention to focus on what was in each day not what I was missing.

You can't go more than a few steps in Italy without tripping over a church and I used that as an opportunity to pop my head in and offer up control to a greater being.

And a prayer to St. Anthony of Padua, patron saint of lost things, maybe helped too :-)

The lighter version:
Tony, Tony
Look around
Something's lost and
Must be found.

5. Optimism. Several times each day I reminded myself: "Whatever works out is going to be absolutely fantastic." By focusing on the enjoyment of each activity I had little room left for negative thoughts.Another traveler commented, "For losing all your luggage you are amazingly joyful. I would be worried and a wreck."

St. Anthony must have been listening…At midnight of the 4th day in Italy, my suitcase found its way to me in the tiny seaside village of Cabras.

I was happy to avoid the hassle of filing a claim...and also a bit disappointed. I relished the challenge of traveling in one set of clothes and finding out how little I really needed to be truly happy.

To your best potential,
Jane