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Documentation
Introducing Collaboration Tools? Three Required Personas for Success
When introducing collaboration tools to an organization – creating the corporate intranet, defining project sites in Sharepoint, etc. – there are multiple skills you must master – well, at least get better at. You need to capture the ideas and communicate the data such that your target reader understands what you are trying to convey [...]
How to Draw an Owl
On Documentation One recent afternoon I found myself in deep conversation with potential consulting partners, holding out for a difficult requirement: “Excellent Documentation”. That’s a tough one to quantify, let alone describe; why hold out for something at once critical and ineffable? Doesn’t every project talk about the importance of providing documentation, yet rarely deliver [...]
A Hierarchy of Information Requirements
It’s a common problem statement – ‘I don’t have enough information to (run my business unit, manage this process, identify opportunities, etc.)’. The solution designer, when faced with a question like this, starts with a little detective work; the problem is too broadly stated.
Technical Debt and the Cost/Benefit of Knowledge Retention
A rather rigorous, Financial-sounding title for a high-concept line of thought …Thanks to Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror, for calling my attention to this article by Martin Fowler on Technical Debt: Technical Debt is a wonderful metaphor developed by Ward Cunningham to help us think about this problem. In this metaphor, doing things the quick [...]
Location, Location, Location: Terminology Confusion in ERP Projects
Have you ever experienced the clash of terminology that results when supply chains are brought together, due to acquisition or merger? The typical scenario: different groups using multiple terms to describe where product is manufactured at and shipped from; folks use terms like “location”, “plant”, and “site” interchangeably, and confusion can result – are we [...]
KM Overcomplicates: Heisenberg Impact on a VBA Quickie
Got a simple request from one of the folks in Operations; we’re sending out Excel spreadsheets for some quick data gathering, might we do a little basic input validation before they send in garbage that needs to be scrubbed? This person is very sharp, knows a decent bit about what is possible, and this is [...]
Zodiac of Knowledge Capture
The start of a new year gives me a rare chance to measure my knowledge capture output over time. I maintain electronic journals for the various projects I am driving, business units and functional areas I support, and people I work with. This results in a hundred or so separate MS Word documents, with generally [...]
The Power of Paper in Business Communications
Confucius was wrong – it is good to live in interesting times … I’m deep-diving into a number of projects at work, while juggling a sudden surge in business travel (the majority of my tweets of late). All of the work involves significant change – different tools & process, or reworking process “traditions” that have [...]
Best Practices for Process Documentation: Iterations (2 of 3)
Last time, I wrote about checklists, and showed the example of the B-17 preflight. Simple, fits on a single page, and hits all the critical steps, in just the right amount of detail. Plenty of processes in the IT department are made That Much Better if they are accompanied by detailed, effective Process Documentation. Of [...]
Optimizing the Wrong Part of Knowledge Management
I sat in on the report-out session from a kaizen event this week, and something occurred to me as I reviewed a ton of interesting findings in a very short time … Best Practice Self-contained deliverables are the most powerful tools for knowledge knowledge transfer you can have in your organization. I’m talking about a [...]
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