By Francoise Tourniaire, founder and principal of FT Works
 Many support organizations struggle with knowledge management. It seems that there is never enough time to create all the documents that should be in the knowledge base, let alone maintain the ones that are already there and are aging – not always gracefully.
While a good process and a good tool help (a lot!), it all comes down to staffing: what kinds of people should be assigned to knowledge management? What’s the most effective way to staff for it? Let’s find out.
Dedicated Team or Not? It shouldn’t be too difficult to make this particular decision. The answer is yes if you have a large team, and if you support low-complexity products.
If you have a large support team (say, over 100), you must have a dedicated team to do the following:
- coordinate the knowledge management efforts
- own the overall structure of the knowledge base
- decide on the knowledge management model
- make decisions on tools
- (and, perhaps, depending on your knowledge management model) create and maintain the content of the knowledge base.
If your team supports low-complexity products, a dedicated team is also a good idea. With low-complexity products it’s possible for a dedicated team to successfully create and maintain content. (On the other hand, with high-complexity products direct, daily interactions with customer issues are usually required to be an effective knowledge creator.)
Net-net: large team or low-complexity product implies a dedicated team.
Find a Champion Regardless of your knowledge management model and your staffing management, you need someone at the top of the organization who believes heart and soul in the benefits of knowledge management and who can drive the necessary processes and investments. If the Support VP isn’t a fan, the project won’t work. If you’re not the Support VP and you want knowledge management to work, start by selling the exec on the benefits of knowledge management – and implement a routine to keep the commitment fresh.
Net-net: cultivate the enthusiasm of the support executive for the knowledge management program.
Selecting Dedicated Knowledge Writers If you decide to work with dedicated writers, you clearly want to select people who can write. But carefully vet their ability to write short, focused, informal knowledge base documents. It takes a special knack to create effective knowledge base documents. Existing support staffers with solid writing skills may do better than professional writers who are more at ease with longer documents.
Net-net: ask potential writers to dash off a 10-line how-to document.
Working with Part-Time Contributors
The #1 issue when working with support staffers who are part-time contributors to the knowledge base is that too often knowledge management falls to the very bottom of their priority list: it simply does not get done, ever. To combat the problem, use the following strategies.
Include knowledge management on the hiring profile. Although writing knowledge base documents is no more difficult than composing an email to a customer, many people are intimidated by the idea of writing a document that will be read by more than one customer. If you talk about it from the start you may get less reluctance.
Plan for knowledge management in the staffing model. If you expect the support staffers to create knowledge in addition to an already busy day helping customers, it won’t happen. Instead, when you do the forecasting and planning add a few minutes per case to create a summary document or build “project” time to work on knowledge management.
Schedule knowledge management. A reasonable staffing model paves the way to being able to make room for knowledge management work, but don’t forget to put it on the schedule (unless you use a KCS model, in which the staffers create documents as they solve customer cases.) Don’t fight the impossible: if you have a busy holiday season, or you just released a new product, you probably need all hands on deck taking care of customers. Make up for it during slack periods.
Make maintenance everyone’s job. Reviewing a big batch of documents is real work, but taking a moment to flag a questionable document should be in everyone’s job description. Improve as you go.
Make it easy to write documents. If support staffers need to follow 23 steps to create a new knowledge document you can bet they won’t do it! Create simple templates with a minimum of formatting requirements and encourage straightforward, checklist-style contributions.
Measure what gets done on a regular basis. If Joe wrote 2 new documents this month and everyone else wrote 12, you should understand why that is. Perhaps Joe’s very busy with a special project; perhaps he “forgot” about knowledge management. Remind him.
Consider using quotas. Quotas that are not properly thought-through can result in lots of junk, but modest quotas balanced with quality measurements are usually fine. Don’t set pure quantity quotas: only count documents that get published and used, or meet some kind of quality criteria.
Balance creation and maintenance. Except for brand-new products, the focus should be on maintenance, as a knowledge base clogged with obsolete, incorrect, and overlapping documents makes for a frustrating search experience. Support staffers who review and clean up documents need incentives to do that on par with what you do for knowledge creation.
Net-net: with part-time contributors, make it easy but mandatory to contribute.
Francoise Tourniaire is the founder and principal of FT Works, a consulting firm that helps technology companies create and grow their support operations. She’s the co-author of Collective Wisdom:Transforming Support with Knowledge, a practical guide for knowledge management in support centers, which was just published in January, 2006. For more information, visit www.ftworks.com or call 650 559 9826. |
