Demonstrating value at Parsons Brinckerhoff

At Parsons Brinckerhoff (PB), the KM team is responsible for oversight of global knowledge exchange for our 10,000-employee civil engineering firm. We monitor both our communities of practice and our intranet utilization, looking for ways that the company can better leverage its vast and diverse knowledge resources. I specifically say better leverage, because our company has been successfully leveraging our global expertise in a consulting capacity to meet and exceed client expectations for well over 100 years of continuous service.

The fact that we’re not doing a great deal that’s radically different in principle than what we’ve been doing since the late 1800s has been the single largest problem in building momentum for our KM program. The more we talked about “doing KM” the more it sounded like what the company’s already been doing forever.

Successful ramp-up and positioning of our KM team eventually involved several steps and a solid commitment from our leadership that in order to get results from KM, the entire company had to do something different. This article describes the development of our KM team, including reasons for choosing each team member, the development of our strategy and the methods we’re using to demonstrate the value of our work including ROI exercises and targets for communities and the use of broad social network analyses.

 

Different demands require different behaviors

For us, the competition is different than it was when we started up in the late 1800s even though we are providing essentially the same services now as we were then. Globalization, rising up on a foundation of increasingly ubiquitous telecommunications technology and a dramatic increase in production factor mobility, is changing the planet by the second. In our industry that means winning a job might very well require joining experts from the US and Australia to support staff in Beijing on a major project pursuit. Local presence doesn’t mean as much to clients now, when anyone can be “local” in a matter of hours and free trade has radically reduced the obstacles for competing as a “foreign” organization.

This environment of increased competition in any given location has intensified the need to differentiate ourselves in the eyes of our clients, who are faced with an increased number of viable choices for the services we provide. For anyone who’s ever followed team sports, globalization for us has been analogous to making the playoffs: during the regular season you could rely on your star players to get your win percentage where it needed to be, but in the playoffs, every team has star players, so the differentiators are in a team’s ability to get a contribution from everybody. You need your role players and bench to step up for the team to win. For multinational corporations, especially those in mature industries, it’s starting to feel like the playoffs every day.

Yet, unlike a team that trains, travels and performs together, globalization has also pushed our workforce to the four corners of the earth. They don’t work in the same building, the same time zone or sometimes even the same language. We’ve now got star players in multiple disciplines in over 125 permanent offices on six continents, but we still need to make our best talent available to work on our biggest pursuits and projects regardless of what time zone they call home. What’s more, we have younger talent who, if exposed to the experience and knowledge of our existing stars, will develop into the stars of tomorrow. It’s therefore critical to our company’s success both today and tomorrow to identify and consistently track our expertise and to push global knowledge exchange.

 

KM behaviors

• Technical aspects such as taxonomy and content management for an intranet, which fall under the domain of IT.
  
• Business strategy aspects such as focusing on product or process innovation, which fall under the domain of market and executive leadership.
  
• Performance appraisal aspects such as requiring senior staff to participate in mentoring and employees to participate in communities of practice, which fall under the domain of HR.

It sometimes seems that if everyone in those areas just stepped up to the plate, there wouldn’t be a need for a KM team at all.

 

Focused, specialized, connected
However, today’s competitive environment necessitates that HR staff focus on being excellent at HR, IT staff focus on being excellent at IT and business leaders focus on being excellent at identifying market opportunities. Furthermore, such an environment necessitates that for all of those elements to be properly coordinated to serve the knowledge needs of our employees on the front lines as best we can, we need a team dedicated to doing just that too.

At PB, we recognized that behavior change is really about a cultural shift. You have to not only get people to do something different, but help them understand why that something matters and get them to believe in the difference that it will make. That requires top-down vision and messaging as well as consistent on-the-ground policies and support.

PB’s senior executive staff recently included knowledge sharing as one of the company’s core values that we all strive to embody in our daily activities. This was a key factor in supporting the top-down catalyst for an enterprise-wide shift in behavior. The KM team was then established to support that shift on the ground.
For the most part, the team was assembled from individuals in the company who had specific insight into the major global systems that were to be the first points of focus for our corporate KM efforts. For example, we tapped individuals who had a clear understanding of our IT environment, policies and strategies, individuals who were deeply involved in the leadership of our communities of practice, and moved the entire group underneath our director of people, the senior executive responsible for HR and employee performance. We then developed strong communication ties to our strategic planning and global markets groups. This cross-discipline approach allows the team to examine specific performance issues related to information and knowledge sharing and to translate those business requirements into IT requirements and/or other programmatic and policy recommendations. The cross-discipline approach also allows us to have those recommendations supported by multiple groups in the company, increasing our chances that they will be acted upon appropriately.

 

Figure 1. Seeing the benefits: Social network analysis snapshots can help you visualize KM development

 

Seeing the benefit

A young KM program should focus on areas where a lack of exchange is causing a clearly defined effect on the company’s bottom line. Business unit managers, slightly closer to the front lines than their supervising executives, may have a better feel for the impact of poor access to information or expertise and thus the benefits of good KM. Chances are there are examples of how KM was done well at your company and how it was done poorly, and some idea of the dollar values associated with each on that front line level. At PB, we’ve taken multiple approaches to our measurement:

1. Promoting value with ROI measures.
   
2. Social network analysis.
   

 

1. Promoting value with ROI measures

Documenting and aggregating examples of KM ROI, both positive and negative, is perhaps the single most powerful tool you can use to win initial and continuing support for a broader effort. Promoting the value of the KM program in terms of real scenarios and actual bottom line implications is effective as it’s the front line managers responsible for profit and loss who will be your key allies in ensuring that the necessary behavior changes happen amongst the employees under their charge.

Example areas for ROI measures

If you have a New York marketing group that outsources creation of animation elements for its presentation despite having an under-utilized capacity for this function in the UK, you can look at the problem from a strict ROI perspective and see if some sort of knowledge exchange can’t add to the company’s bottom line. If you save on outsourcing costs and increase utilization through an increased awareness in New York of what the UK group knows, those are two metrics that everybody will understand immediately. Simply pointing to increased intranet publishing rates or the creation of a new animation library for the UK group alone doesn’t mean much in and of itself, but once the cost savings and utilization percentage implications are quantified, people see the potential and are more likely interested in the underlying metrics to get you there. As the point of business is to ultimately make more money than you’re spending, your KM metrics need to address that objective explicitly.

Our KM team works with each local group to match local objectives to KM-related functionality, behavior and eventually results. It must be obvious to the community leadership how the metrics and targets associated with any KM workflow they engage in enhance the group’s ability to meet goals.

Our KM team works closely with each community to determine a metric set which is rational and appropriate for the local group but which also can retain meaning when aggregated at the corporate level. For some communities the metrics are about finding and utilizing in-house expertise more efficiently, leading to a reduction in outsourcing costs. For other communities the focus is on enabling meaningful interaction between globally dispersed experts to generate breakthrough solutions for a given client issue. In all cases, the community leadership is treated as the KM team’s customer at PB, presenting existing business problems with real ROI attached. With the ROI already defined even before the KM group arrives on the scene, the relative success of the KM initiative designed to address that problem is readily apparent and translated into terms and metrics that the local community leadership cares about.

 

2. Social network analysis

Another method we’ve used to help us “see results” from KM is to take snapshots of networking activity. A social network analysis allows you to quantify the volume of interaction between any two functional groups. The analysis shown in Figure 1 (above) is a snapshot of some of PB’s communities of practice. The larger the node, the more members that community of practice has. The darker the node, the more internal activity that community reported. The thicker the line connecting the nodes, the more those two communities report interactions between members of each community. This type of analysis can help pinpoint areas where collaboration and knowledge sharing must be increased. A snapshot of the network later in time should show whether the initiatives are having the desired effect.

 

When in doubt, ask the experts

In 1959 Peter Drucker introduced the concept of the knowledge worker in recognition that front line employees, if empowered by training and access to knowledge, would drive the creation of wealth in the future economy. This transition of where expertise is held in a company from a centralized model to a distributed model should be mirrored by the system put in place to measure it. Who better to evaluate whether or not they have adequate access to knowledge that they need than the experts themselves? Dr Kevin DeSouza, in an interview for the November/December 2006 issue of KM Review, warns that relying on “soft” metrics such as employee satisfaction surveys is a recipe for disaster when trying to convince executives of the value of a KM program. But the softness he is rightly concerned about is inherent in the quality of the questions asked, not the fact that the answers are from the employees themselves.

Without a doubt, a KM program must keep aggregate metrics that won’t require answers to survey questions. For example, social network analysis of e-mail data can track exchange between previously siloed working groups and other logical partnering groups in the organization, overall contributions to knowledge libraries across the organization should be monitored, and cross-discipline collaborations resulting in new products or exploitation of new markets should be encouraged and well documented.

The basics of KM success should be judged on a few fundamentals. Regardless of whether the type of knowledge exchange is best mediated via an electronic document, a direct mentoring experience or an online collaboration, the result should be that your company’s employees are more easily able to find and put to use valuable knowledge. Simple questions such as “Are you able to access the information and experts you need to complete your work better than last year?” should be met with more “Yes” answers the more success the program is having. The less time and effort knowledge workers spend getting the information and expertise they need to address client requests, the more productive they will be.

Turning buzz into momentum

There is a lot of buzz around KM in the business world today and your company is probably not immune. The key to demonstrating value of your KM program is filtering out the buzz and focusing on the business (see sidebox, above).
Buzz is not all bad as it’s an indicator that there are those in the company that are excited about trying something new, about doing something better. But every single enthusiast who is championing a KM solution without a business ROI problem to match may be doing the program’s reputation more harm than good. In today’s global business environment of hyper competition, we can’t afford to do KM for the sake of KM alone and expect long-term support.

 

 

Stay focused to maintain value

Companies have been managing knowledge for as long as business has been around. Most of what KM consists of isn’t new. However, today’s business environment requires an intensive focus on how knowledge gets exchanged across geographic, cultural and behavioral barriers. There’s clear business value in doing KM well, but if you don’t weed out the hype early, it’s difficult for the value to show through.