KM that works — ASAP for Implementation roadmap updates

A quick KM win anecdote and kudos to my team.  The director who leads our methodology and enablement team drove a simple, but effective, effort to incorporate the conversation from our internal social media into our external-facing methodologies.  A new set of accelerators - samples, templates, and white papers - was published based on frequency analysis of [...]

Delivering Global Projects

Craig Borysowich’s post on special considerations for international projects (here) IDs some important factors.   Also, I have to like a guy who went for the Modigliani image (see here).  Here is his list and my comments:
Impact of Distance — The extreme distance between “home base” and the customer site can be extremely costly to the project.  Make [...]

Engaging middle management in “Enterprise 2.0″

Following up on an earlier post on Web 2.0 blockers (here), I’ll forward some block “busting” suggestions from that Clint Boulton report on Enterprise 2.0 (here). 
Middle managers in their ’50s will likely not have been as exposed to computers and their corresponding technologies….   [T]he way older generations adopt the tools is different.  For example, a [...]

Facing Reality, “Ground Truth,” etc.

One of the best aspects of Graham Durant-Law’s blog (here) is his willingness to “tell on himself” and the KM profession.  When recalling an interview he gave to a KM researcher, he quotes from an old David Snowden post (here) to good effect:
I have sat in many a conference listening to a presentation from a [...]

Middle management blocking blogs, wikis, syndication

Clint Boulton reports on an Enterprise 2.0 panel that tackled one of the most frustrating barriers to collaboration adoption — middle managers (here). 
Middle management is one of the key obstacles to the adoption of user-generated content tools such as blogs, wikis and RSS feeds in businesses…[per Sean Dennehy from the CIA:] ”They’re not onboard yet. They’re not [...]

Innovation and Leadership Lessons from Pixar

The McKinsey Quarterly always has some excellent work on-line, even without a premium membership (though you do need to register).  This interview with Brad Bird, a two-time Oscar winning director at Pixar, caught my eye (here).  Three points in particular from both technically challenging projects (The Incredibles) and team turnarounds (The Iron Giant):
When coming up [...]

Assessing your virtual team…a checklist

Brainstorming on stakeholder relationships is difficult enough without having to account for virtual team dynamics.  Understanding these is a fundamental to the new generation of virtual-team projects. Ken Thompson at www.bioteams.com (post here) has a nice checklist/approach, centered on eight dimensions of virtual teams:
Nature of Team Objective, Team Leadership/Management Style, Team Member Profile, Team Shape, Team Environment, Team [...]

Leveraging your smart people

Interesting post by Dennis Howlett at AccMan (here).  I’ve always made a point of including folks who can and will challenge my thinking.  As Dennis says:
I like discovering smart people who can make connections that I miss, didn’t consider or just plain forgot.
The challenge for me is to set up my organization in a way [...]

Implicit Contract w/ Knowledge Workers

Graham has an important reminder about the tacit agreement between management and highly-skilled workers (here).
Knowledge workers are educated thinking people. They expect their efforts to be acknowledged and rewarded appropriately. They expect some variety in their work, as well as a degree of autonomy. They expect the loyalty they show to be reciprocated and to [...]

KM in Practice 2.0

Miguel Cornejo just posted his paper on Visions of KM 2.0 (here), which he was kind enough let me preview and comment on.  The tenor of our exchanges are fairly represented by his post introducing he paper:
For quite a while now, I’ve felt that most business managers were not getting a clear message about knowledge [...]