Draining

Our organization has new management. They do not know the backgrounds of staff and the expertise of their own internal people. How do we tap into the expertise of our own people? External experts tend to come and go because they lack the business knowledge. This can be a drain on permanent staff because they have to constantly train or brief the externals!

Cuts

All funding for new jobs and contractors has been cut. 40% of our contractors have left and much of this knowledge has not been documented - "It's in our heads".

ISO 9000

Our organization was advised that for its ISO 9000 accreditation, we should use internal people rather than external consultants and that we should map our processes as they actually were rather than they should have been.

Both parts of this advice were ignored. We ended up with a shelf full of manuals that no one uses.

Ignored Handover

At a large multinational, I worked on a project for a year. When it was completed, I did everything I could to ensure the handover of the project - handover notes, process documentation. When i stopped working in that role, no one used it. That "embedded structural capital" was lost.

Expertise Outsourced to Contractors

Here’s a story about government procurement and expertise. There was a huge contract up for renewal. Management was concerned because the incumbent contractor wouldn’t have competition so it wouldn’t be “free and open competition.” Therefore they split the procurement and this led to a great deal of churn and disruption of work, because the contractor’s familiarity with our organization was broken up too.

We Had to Do it Ourselves

We need to use software to manage our safety data sheets. IT put up a software package that was a dismal failure because they did not scope all the requirements well enough. We created a very simple material safety data sheet (MSDS) system from scratch based on our experience.

Inexperience Can Be Deadly

From BBC news 30 July 2009

A fatal accident inquiry will be held into the death of a cancer patient who was given a massive overdose of radiation, BBC Scotland has learned. Lisa Norris was 16 when she died in 2006, months after staff at Glasgow's Beatson Oncology Centre miscalculated her treatment for a brain tumour.

A post-mortem examination found the brain tumour caused her death. But it is understood the Procurator Fiscal has agreed to hold an inquiry, which will look again at the case. Lisa was initially diagnosed with a brain tumour in October 2005. Three months later she was given radiation treatment 58% higher than prescribed, which left her with burns on her head and neck.

'Critical error'
She died in October 2006 at her home in Girvan, Ayrshire. The teenager's parents, Keith and Liz Norris, have said NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde failed in their duty of care. A report commissioned by Scottish ministers identified a "critical error" in Lisa's treatment plan by inexperienced staff. It said the overdose happened after an under-qualified and under-trained member of staff entered a wrong number on a form. Another report, commissioned by the teenager's solicitor following a BBC Scotland investigation, suggested the chances of survival were in Lisa's favour until the mistake.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/glasgow_and_west/8176341.stm

Bad Apple

Once I was director of Education. This person was in charge of HR. His task was to move people between schools. I discovered that he was bribed by people. We had to take him out and reorganize everything. There were closures of towns in this country – large constraints. Took a lot of process mapping, survey of HR Team. Took 3 months before everything was re-organised again.

Toyota’s Canteen

A story from Toyota about a big canteen where a lot of knowledge sharing takes place. You feel safe, loyal, secure in that culture.

Interpersonal skills

I have had managers with the same level of experience & status. Those with interpersonal skills and a better engagement style get better outcomes.

Experience Slows Us Down

Experienced staff have better recall, but they tend to fall back on past practices. This impedes exploration. During brainstorming, ideas don’t generate. No one dares to set a precedent. They say “If you go by past files, you can’t go wrong.”

Protocol

At Corporate Communications, we handle visits from overseas. One person in our department is very experienced. We always go to her for protocol issues. She’s very helpful. If she leaves, we’ll have issues. She‘s been doing this for 5 years.

What the user wants?

Business Analysts travel to customer locations to figure what are the requirements for a specific customer project. They usually do the exercise for a couple of months by user interviews, workshops to figure the user needs. Often there are large parts that the business analysts do not uncover as it will involve understanding a technical implementation.End of it they submit their reports usually in document and presentation format to the designers to start building the solution. The vocabulary and language is so different from what a designer can understand that neither the reports can be used for further development nor do they have a full picture of the user needs.

The Helpdesk

The Lotus Notes team helped us putting news summaries on the intranet. Then management disbanded the team and outsourced Notes support to IBM. The new guys couldn't fix the problems. Eventually we found one person who could help us so we would always ask for him on the helpdesk. Anyone else who need a lot explaining to them before they could do anything. We always went to that one IBM guy when we could.

The Filing Cabinet

I opened a filing cabinet and there were just piles of stuff in there. I had no idea what this all meant and whether I could do anything with it.

The Thesaurus

We had a KM team that then got disbanded. One person in that team had put together a thesaurus. Later on, someone else wanted to create a taxonomy. So we went back to the thesaurus but we couldn't properly understand it.

I am turning into the boss-from-hell

I work in a high-end firm in our sector. We would cost on average 25% more than our competitors. We can charge more because we have quite high standards when it comes to the work we let leave our building. Recently we have had a relatively high employee churn. Some of the experience has left the building across all levels of seniority.

I manage a small team of relatively inexperienced consultants. I spend a lot of time with them showing them the basics. I send them projects from the archives that may relate to what they are working on (or things that may be useful in the future). When they are working on new things, I point them in the direction of old projects that tried to tackle the same issue, or dealt in the same category. I will also encourage them to go and talk to others in the organisation that may be able to help. I am also trying to instill in them a strong sense of basic project management; basic things like organisation and naming of files on the shared drive, how to communicate with clients, keeping on top of suppliers etc.

Maybe I am too impatient (I know I am becoming increasingly this way), but if I show them how to do something I have an expectation that they will pick it up straight away. I don’t mind maybe one more explanation or walk-through. But I am so frustrated right now at how little they appear to be picking the basics up, or willing to take responsibility for aspects of their projects. These are smart people, with degrees, on relatively high salaries. They are not graduates – most have been in the industry for three or four years. Two of them have told me they are not “details” people – which makes me want to scream. The time I spend with them explaining things takes away from my ability to drive business (I am responsible for our group meeting a financial target) and do the other consulting work I am expected to do. I have to fit a lot of my own work in after hours. Sometimes they feel like a team of hungry little birds, demanding and swarking but not giving anything back in return. I find myself now just doing something myself instead of asking them and showing them how, because work appears to keep coming back that is sloppy, or contains errors, or is just plain lazy. This was OK for 12 months – I had an expectation that they needed time to settle in and learn the things that they needed to do for the types of projects we work on, an the types of clients we work with. But now I have no patience – it just feels lazy and sloppy now. Before I would spend time explaining what needed to be fixed and why, now I just send it back with a message “fix it”. I feel like I am turning into the boss-from-hell, but to be honest it feels better to be this way than keep cleaning up after them and working 12 or more hour days five times a week.

Young People Today...

I was working on a project where the programmers were very experimental and not very systematic – a “try it and see” approach. Fortunately they had a very experienced project manager and business analyst leading it. Her very strong, analytical approach is not being taught in universities, so the younger programmers don’t have her skills.

Sociable

I have a colleague who knows the organisation really well. Anyone can go and ask her about anything. Whenever she’s around, everyone around her works better, because she sets the atmosphere.

Passion and Context

In my previous organisation we were rolling out a new office software and had to do it very quickly. We used the official training materials from the software vendor. It was all done in such a rush that we had no time to evaluate how it was working, then after about a month we started getting complains from project managers who said the training wasn’t working, and it was affecting productivity. We thought that was strange because we were using the official materials. There was one woman in the team who was really good at using the new application, and she was very passionate and committed about what she did. So we took a risk, and took her out of her normal job to do full-time training. She was able to relate the application to her colleagues’ work context, and it worked really well.