I am new to an organization who is looking at a potential KM Project in the upcoming year and have asked me to write a business case with only very broad direction that would help them evaluate whether it becomes an approved project. I am a little "stuck" given the magnitude of the initiative, any advice on getting a good start on the planning stage?

 

Hi Stephan,

I liked the concept, and it can be applied internally as KPIs for KM activities. But not sure how HR can think about it in terms of calculating employees productivity (Given that they want to assign number of hours to each activity, same as in production lines  related measurements )

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From: "Stephen Bounds km@... [sikmleaders]"
To: sikmleaders@...
Sent: Tuesday, 7 November 2017, 16:28
Subject: Re: [sikmleaders] Calculating KM employees' productivity

 

Hi Soha,

This comes out of the social media space, but I believe it is still highly relevant to KM. My recommendation is to implement some form of relative return on investment measure (RROI). In other words, you should be looking to:

• agree on desirable behaviours
• agree on one or several methods for achieving these desired behaviours
• use RROI as a metric to assess the cost effectiveness of each method in achieving its stated goals
  

This still requires agreement that there is an intrinsic good in performing these behaviours. If you are missing even that level of buy in then you need to do some sort of modelling of the benefits of KM. I'm not a fan of the "X minutes saved per transaction" approach as a rule. More often organisations will be more convinced by arguments of risk reduction or innovation harvesting through improved decision-making.

If you have a reasonably high volume process which can demonstrate a link to better KM, you can use a Monte Carlo to demonstrate benefits by simulating the expected change in system variable and financial outcomes. For example:

• scenario X happens 4000 times per year
• we currently have a trend of 10 severity 2 incidents and 30 severity 3 incidents per 1000 cases
• applying improved KM aims to reduce severity 2 and severity 3 incidents by 20%
• there is a 95% chance to yield benefits of $25000 -> $100000
  (that's not a real example, just illustrative)
  

Cheers,
-- Stephen.

====================================
Stephen Bounds
Director & Principal Consultant
knowquestion Pty Ltd
E: sb@...
M: 0401 829 096
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On 7/11/2017 6:36 PM, soharadwan@... [sikmleaders] wrote:

 

I wonder if there are any of  articles/ writings that tackle the challenge of calculating the productivity of knowledge workers/ KM staff. In brief, sometimes HR people are not very aware of the nature of the KM work. Thus when auditing/ calculating the productivity of KM employees using number of hours, they sometimes disregard time taken in designing activities, work done in spreading the sharing culture, setting KM measures, etc. So have you come across any kind of related articles? Or even studies related to employees productivity when working with intangibles like KM, innovation, etc.?

Thanks and regards,

Soha