Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/34417
PRACTICAL TIPS FOR CREATING A KM STRATEGY Based on my personal experience in building KM strategies, I believe it is important to: engage your stakeholders; prioritize your efforts; and be bold. • Engage: Successful KM strategies are formed through a collaborative process that engages your firm’s business and practice leaders, practicing lawyers, KM team members, and other business support department leaders in fact-finding, vision and program formation, and prioritization efforts. Strategic interviews are a key component of this collaboration and you can find a sample questionnaire that I’ve used in the past here: http://bit.ly/KMinterview. This engagement is essential to ensure your plan is tailored to your firm and that all parties involved understand it and their roles in its success. This collaborative process necessarily takes time, measured in months and not weeks, but it ultimately makes the plan “Our KM Strategy,” not “KM’s Strategy.” This understanding, ownership and participation are essential to long-term support and adoption. • Prioritize: As Syndrome said in the movie The Incredibles, “If everyone is super, then no one is.” So while there may be many possible KM projects of value, you must focus on the most important ones for your firm at any specific point in time. One of my favorite tools to help do this is Sally’s “Field of Dreams” prioritization quadrant shown below. High project project Field of Dreams project project Field of Gain service project project service project Field of Pain project Low Ease of Implementation © 26 Sally Gonzalez project Field of Distraction project High This process involves taking all the initiatives your team comes up with, laying them out on the grid and ranking them relative to each other in terms of business value and ease of implementation. The Field of Gain contains high-value and easy projects, which should be your near-term quick wins. The Fields of Distraction and Pain are things you need to avoid wherever possible. And the initiatives shown in your Field of Dreams are your strategic initiatives that will deliver long-term success. See a more detailed illustration of this technique here: http://bit.ly/Prioritize. Knowledge Management ILTA White Paper Value to the Firm