Knowledge management planning

Post by Edgar Tan 

Knowledge management projects typically require significant awareness raising, education and change management efforts to get buy-in and participation from operational level managers. Such managers are often impatient with theoretical KM frameworks and concepts or high level strategies, and they can easily dismiss KM as too fuzzy and impractical to be useful. Knowledge managers frequently find themselves preoccupied with fighting defensive actions around understanding and buy-in, instead of directly planning, orchestrating and executing knowledge management strategies and programmes.

In the KM Planning workshop Edgar Tan and Kim Martins took the participants through a facilitated and staged participatory planning process using a set of performance support tools to:

• diagnose specific pain points in the operations that can be supported through KM 
• identify cultural factors that support or inhibit more effective knowledge sharing and use 
• focus managers on the areas they believe are of highest priority to them
• help managers identify appropriate KM approaches, methods and tools to support their priority areas 

The value of a participatory planning approach is that operational managers are themselves working with the KM team to identify the main components of a KM intervention, rather than having a KM team impose a solution from outside. This removes much of the burden of getting buy-in (because prioritisation and selection of approaches are done by the managers themselves), and the awareness and education process is focused on explaining the approaches and methods that managers themselves select as possible candidates.

If you wish to see how the process works, read this blog post and watch the embedded video:http://www.greenchameleon.com/gc/blog_detail/conducting_a_km_planning_exercise/