Using tech to create KM secret sauce at KMWorld 2023

What’s the number-one thing that comes with a new project? Meetings! And lots of them, such as the kickoff, weekly updates, milestone check ins, brainstorming sessions, decision sessions—the list goes on and on. What if there were a way to virtually eliminate all of them and get the work done more efficiently?

In fall 2021, during the height of COVID, a cross-department core team at PROS kicked off a new project spanning 4 months to evaluate and select a new learning management system (LMS)—no small task in and of itself.

At KMWorld 2023, Brad English, senior manager, learning development, PROS, Inc. and ATD Houston; Michele Myers, director, global education and enablement, PROS, Inc.; and Pablo Gomes, subsea training manager, Petrobras and Regional Director, SBGC (Brazilian Society of Knowledge Management) discuss “Using Tech to Create KM Secret Sauce” during their session.

“What makes projects survive or fail boils down to the tools you use,” English said.

English and Myers shared their efforts to innovate and adjust to a new way of working: collaborating asynchronously with minimal meetings while leveraging all existing technology.

“Meetings distracts from getting things done,” English said.

They discussed their results in eliminating an estimated 1,000 hours of meetings and saving the company approximately $54,000 in employee time. Best of all, the project finished on time and has proven to be a successful selection.

“We did this not knowing if we were going to be successful,” Myers said. “Not only did we need to do this, since we were in the middle of COVID, we had to do this.”

In the beginning, by sharing a video explaining the plan company-wide, they shaved down on the time to get employees ready for how they were going to communicate, Myers explained. Most of the communication happened between email and Microsoft SharePoint interface.

By adding Microsoft Forms, employees could vote on vendors and various other decisions, along with keeping track of the history of the project.

“We were able to eliminate 125 meetings by just doing this,” English said.

Gomes discussed how the COVID pandemic brought the opportunity to use technology in favor of recording and disseminating knowledge.

Face-to-face courses were transformed into online webinars spread across the internet; courses and lectures were recorded to allow registration, among other things.

“We digitalized education and uploaded more content to the web,” Gomes said.

The digital platforms included Microsoft, SAP, and others, he explained. Training needed to be adapted as well by using Microsoft Teams. After a period of adaptation, as a knowledge manager he saw an opportunity to use these new tools to improve areas of the company, he said.

Gomes showed how Petrobras took advantage of technology to continue the evolution in KM after the pandemic, bringing the general context of continuity and a case study started in 2022 to generate ebooks for training courses for new employees, through recording face-to-face classes and subsequent conversion into ebooks.

It optimized costs and cut down on the time for training, Gomes said. Knowledge dissemination increased along with all efforts. It optimized student and instructor time as well.

“Before the pandemic we only had 7 ebooks and lectures,” Gomes said. “After the pandemic we increased these materials by 300%. We also used these new tools to improve the quality of these online educational materials.”

KMWorld returned to the J.W. Marriott in Washington D.C. on November 6-9, with pre-conference workshops held on November 6.

KMWorld 2023 is a part of a unique program of five co-located conferences, which also includes Enterprise Search & Discovery, Enterprise AI World, Taxonomy Boot Camp, and Text Analytics Forum.