Taking Baby Steps (part 4): The Ten-Step Plan

Here it is. Feedback is always welcome. Naturally.

1. Need a Blog: Pick a Blogging platform but do your best to leverage an in-house platform, if one exists. Please, do not simply download some Blogging software into your work environment. Reach out to your friendly, neighborhood IT dept for guidance.
   
2. Put a project into your "lab": Pick a small project that can benefit from improved transparency. By "small" I mean one that is not super critical and one that you have some leeway to experiment with. These tend to be the types of projects where Delivering is your primary responsibility and not Joe's...
   
3. Don't overdo it: Establish guidelines about what kind of information is worth "tracking". I've outlined some ideas in my previous posts ("Taking Baby Steps" series). In essence, establish a Knowledge Base of some sort, even if you have to cobble something together. Don't over-engineer your posts. Like a good workout program, keep it lively, keep it real, reduce obstacles so you can sustain.
   
4. Dogfood: Spend a few weeks being selfish and commit information to the KB that helps you be successful on your project.
5. Dangle the carrot: Give the link or RSS Feed to this KB to your manager and your team-mates. Use the content as a basis for your meeting agendas and follow-ups. Work on getting your colleagues to read your post prior to the meetings. One way to do this is to send a plain-old-email with a link to your post an hour ahead of a meeting. Make it clear that the meeting will cover the agenda enumerated there and you'd like to spend less time regurgitating and spend more time decision-making.
   
6. Aggressively seek the ever-elusive "manager" comments on your blog. Period. Your efforts will not succeed without a completed Feedback loop. Active participation is key.
   
7. Manage expectations: This is not a be all, end all solution. Make sure that your social network is aware of this fact.
   
8. Tag it up: Create a taxonomy of "special" Tags and standardize them. That is agree, for example, that all weekly summaries posted to individual product blogs should be Tagged as "weekly" and that all 2-week look-aheads should be Tagged as "iteration".
9. Roll it up: Construct a Dashboard Tab that may be of value to your manager's manager by rolling up RSS feeds filtered by your "weekly" and "iteration" tags. Get your manager's, manager's manager to acknowledge its usefulness. If you can pull this off, send me an email and I will honor you with the Order of Blogging Ninja.
10. Road show: Leverage your network to identify like-minded individuals who will benefit from a similar set up. Document the set-up process, best practices and your experiences on a Wiki as you explain the process to your buddy. Encourage your buddy to contribute to this Wiki as (s)he works out the implementation and goes through the process. Rinse and repeat. After a month or two, put together a Forum of sorts and present your findings to your department. Please don't be boring. Then, go to Disney World.

I'll let the 10th point act as the transition into the world of Wikis; coming up next.

Taking Baby Steps (part 1): Personal, Ad-hoc KB

Overview
This collection of posts is part ideology and part methodology aimed at Knowledge Workers still struggling to embrace the Blog and Wiki whateveryoucallit. I don't blame them. The words "Blog", "Wiki", "Tag", and so on, meant very little to me as well until I put each of the technologies to a very specific use.

What started out as a system to manage developer teams overseas turned into a Pipeline for Knowledge Sharing within a Team.

To me, collaboration is a Bottom-to-Top story. It begins with a very selfish Network of One. And that's OK! If you can't prove value to yourself, how can you prove it to the guy sitting next to you at meetings?

Mental Filters
Like many Knowledge Workers, I suffer from information overload and a bad memory. First step is always admitting you have a problem, right? Now, I tend to ask myself two questions whenever I deal with information:

• Is it useful to me now?
• Might it be useful to me later?
  

If there's even a remote chance that I'm dealing with Useful Information, it needs to go into my Knowledge Base. This is my Mental Filter. All incoming information competing for my attention goes through this and other filters.

A Blog is a Personal, Ad-hoc Knowledge Base
It just so happens that the simplest and most complete Knowledge Base I know of is my Blog. It's mine. It's for me. I don't care about structure, colorful phrasings, or a full bibliography. I just need useful knowledge sans the BS. If I take the time out of my Very Busy Schedule to throw something into my Knowledge Base (KB), I owe it to no-one but myself to only post useful and Highly Relevant information.

I also haven't figured out how to not live in my INBOX so I want to be able to email my KB.

Side Note: But wait, why not store everything in email and search there? With Blogging, selfishness turns into something very useful for the rest of the Team. Email just doesn't have that kind of potential for collaboration.

Finally, I want control over the organization of my Knowledge Base but I don't have time to organize into pretty folders. I just want the information I need at my fingertips with minimum management. And while on the topic of being selfish, I want the search functionality to work for me; I want to help it help me. I want to be able to Tag my KB posts with words or phrases that serve as Keys to Knowledge in my head. It should be easy for me to share these Keys with the cyborg extension to my head that is my personal KB. The search functionality in my KB should pay special attention to these Tags a.k.a Keys. It's a matter of improving relevancy and hence my productivity.

A note about Privacy Concerns
Start with a Blog that your Firm provides for you. It should be internal and inaccessible from the outside world by the outside world. Don't worry about protecting your posts from the prying eyes of colleagues. Focus on yourself. Only your immediate network will ever care about what you have to say anyway. Post openly, but only post work-related information. Remember, you don't have the time to post on anything else.

What kinds of things should I post about?
It took me a bit of trial and error to figure out my Blogging sweet-spot. At first you'll post too much or too little. Remember, it's for you so figure out what works for you.

Some ideas on what you may want to track in your KB:

• You figure out how to do something, save yourself brain space, write yourself a mini how-to
  
• You solve a problem, post solution so you don't have to solve it again
• Someone owes you a TPS report
• You've identified follow-up items at your 3-hour meeting
• You wish to condense your meeting to 15 minutes by posting an Agenda to your KB
• Someone else posted something that may be useful to you later

Ans so on...

Conclusion
When picking out a KB starter-kit, be selfish. My recommendation is to go with a Blog. Blogs have many useful features; clearly I've only scratched the surface. But really, the other features will come in handy later. Here is what you should ask of your Personal, Ad-hoc Knowledge Base Blog:

• Can you email it?
• Can you tag posts?
• Can you tag posts within your email?
• Can you search it?
• Are your search results influenced by the tags you assign to your posts?

Good news is most Blog implementations already do this. Your friendly, neighborhood IT department will help you set one up.

Up Next
In my next post, I will talk about how KB-directed Selfishness is, in fact, very useful to Team-mates.