The Top Five KCS Ditches, and How to Stay Out of Them
KCS is already the definitive best practice for knowledge management in service and support organizations, but it is increasingly being used enterprisewide—in professional services, product development, marketing and sales, HR, and the IT service desk. KCS allows everyone to have easy access to the collective experience of the entire organization.
KCS comprises eight practices: four used when answering questions or resolving issues (the "solve" loop) and four implemented by the organization and its leaders on an ongoing basis (the "evolve" loop).
Solve loop practices include: capturing knowledge that is learned while helping the customer, and structuring that knowledge in a simple, straightforward way; reusing knowledge that's available in the knowledgebase to avoid solving the same problem twice; and improving knowledge that needs updating or correcting whenever you use it.
To continually improve the performance of the solve loop, organizations must evolve. They devote resources to content health,creating value-added content like videos or resolution wizards for common or high-impact topics. They use technology for process integration, making the solve loop as seamless as possible and avoiding redundant data entry. Performance assessment gives everyone on the team feedback about the value they're creating in knowledge, encouraging ongoing improvement. And, KCS requires leadership and communication, reminding people frequently of the vision of knowledge and how it helps customers, the company and each team member personally.
The key ideas of KCS are simple and elegant, but KCS implementations can run into challenges. The KCS community uses the word "ditches" to describe common ways that KCS implementations miss the mark. Having implemented KCS with many customers, here are our top five ditches, and how to avoid them.
1. No executive sponsorship. KCS is a big change in the way organizations do business, requiring updated job descriptions, performance measures and most of all, a new way of thinking about the work. Change is hard, and requires an articulate and persistent senior executive advocate.
2. Focusing on numbers over behavior. It's true, you can't manage what you can't measure, and service and support organizations are especially fond of quantitative measures and explicit goals. Measures are really important for assessing and improving KCS performance. But if you set purely numbers-based goals for activities, you'll likely end up in a ditch.
What's wrong with measuring activities? Well, nothing—as a matter of fact, KCS encourages you to measure, for example, how many articles are being created, how often they're being edited and how often they're being reused. Looking at trends and variations in these activities provides a heads-up about who is and isn't participating in the knowledge program, or who needs coaching about the practices and their benefits. For example, if a team member adds lots of new content without doing much editing or reuse, it's likely he's not searching effectively to find what's already in the knowledgebase. He may even be harming the knowledgebase by adding duplicate content.
The problem comes when managers put explicit quotas on activities: "80% of cases need a link to knowledge" or "everyone must create five knowledgebase articles per month." By taking judgment out of the process, managers risk turning KCS into a numbers game. People will make their quotas, but probably won't be doing things the way they ought to, with a focus on quality over quantity.
Putting goals on activities corrupts the knowledgebase. Use activity metrics as a way to understand attitudes and behavior, not as goals unto themselves.
3. Lack of coaching. When we talk with people about KCS coaching, we often get a brush-off. "People already have managers. They'll do fine without coaching."
In fact, peer coaching delivers crisp, tangible results. KCS takes ongoing reinforcement. Like a good personal trainer, a coach provides encouragement, an inspiring example, and a structured regimen with scheduled meeting times to build people's KCS "muscles."
Unfortunately, coaching takes time, especially at first, and busy teams often feel they can't afford it. Coaches who aren't supported by their managers may spend some time coaching, but not enough to develop the skills and habits. The coaches—and the program—are stuck, continually making the investment but never getting the benefit.
Another ditch is picking the wrong coaches—often, technical experts. KCS coaches are mentors, guides and influencers—"people people"—with the skills to listen well, patiently provide feedback, and inspire others to their best performance. Thinking about your most technical people, is that how you'd describe them? The most effective coaches we've seen may not be subject-matter experts, but they're the kind of people that other people want to spend time with, and take feedback from. Picking the right coaches, and giving them time to coach, is one of the best ditch avoidance strategies that we've seen.
4. Insisting on perfection. We spend so much time focusing on excellence in our organizations that it's important to remember Voltaire: "Perfect is the enemy of the good." Knowledge captured in the workflow must be sufficient to solve the issue, but it needn't be stunning prose.
The austere structure of KCS articles keeps things simple. KCS articles use complete thoughts, but not complete sentences. Content is organized into structured sections. The focus is on facts. To some, the KCS article format can look utilitarian, or even unprofessional, especially if a typo or misspelling sneaks in. They'll suggest review queues, professional editing, and other time-consuming processes "because our customers deserve the very best."