KCS - DB Kay & Associates

KCS At Work: Daktronics Does It Right

1 May

There’s nothing like hearing about KCS from someone who is actually doing it—and benefitting from it. Our friends at Daktronics just sent this great email along, and kindly gave us permission to share it on the blog.

Daktronics is a South Dakota-based manufacturer of LED signboards, from high school football scoreboards to major league arena installations and Las Vegas spectaculars. Their technicians have to be conversant with a very broad range of products, including complex hardware and software. This makes KCS a natural fit for them, and they’ve done a great job of adopting it.

Anyhow, on to the message, from a technician who was on call overnight:

I wanted to share a win with you guys.

I had worked a long day yesterday, about 10.5 hours. I go home, set up for being on call at night, and wait for the phone to start ringing. Doesn’t take long and I get my first hit. I work with the customer for approximately 20 minutes and schedule a call back for 30 minutes later. In the meantime I’m needing to log off of our network to do some connection testing for a different customer’s secure network (I can’t be tunneled into our network and theirs at the same time) Shortly before I start this adventure I received an IM from one of our Customer Trainers in Australia. She had some questions about [a product feature] not showing up: they were created but wouldn’t show up in [the software]. I’m going to be very blunt here, “I’m pretty bad at the software parts of our product” end quote. When she initially asked me about this, my first thought was “aaawwww crap, I have no idea.” So we restarted some services and checked a few other overall basics. In the meantime I started searching the KB. I found very few articles describing anything close to my issue. Then I broadened the search by using just a few more keywords. Wouldn’t you know it, a bright light came shining down from the KCS Gods and delivered the right KB article right into my lap. I had called the trainer about 5 minutes earlier so all I did was walk her through the article. After completing the steps (which took all of 15 seconds) her reaction was “OH, THERE THEY ARE, THEY SHOWED UP!!!!!!!! YEAH!!!!!!” I was then able to still test my network connectivity for the other customer, and still make my 30 minute call back. Now if that’s not awesome, I’m not quite sure what is!

Hope this brightens your day as much as it brightened my night last night. Have a great day!!!!!!!!!!!

Why Train KCS Coaches?

By: David Kay 1 Comment

25 Feb

A client working to justify the expense of coach training asked for a risk assessment of not training her coaches. I thought that was an excellent question. Having given it some thought, here’s my response, captured and shared in the workflow.

There are three critical success factors for KCS:

Engaged executive sponsorship

Measuring the right things, and using those measures the right way

Having the right coaches, properly prepared, and given the time to coach

I can fairly say that I’ve seen lots of variation in successful KCS programs, but I’ve never seen a successful implementation without these three things.

Without appropriate training, your coaches will not:

Feel confident enough in their own KCS skills that they’re able to model the behavior and provide feedback to others

Understand how to use KCS measures to assess knowledge developers’ progress towards licensing

Feel comfortable giving direct, helpful feedback

Understand influence skills and how to use them

Understand how beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors interrelate, and how to intervene

Be able to tell when someone is ready for licensing

Be calibrated with each other in using the Article Quality Checklist and the Content Standard

Understand how to structure their coaching sessions, and have the right job aids for coaching

In other words, without this kind of training, your coaches aren’t going to be prepared to run effective coaching sessions. Given the time that you’re investing in coaching, that’s an enormous waste of resources…and one that puts the success of the overall project at risk.

What’s your experience been with preparing coaches? Am I overstating the risk of not training them?

(HT RW)

From Article Quality to Resolution Quality

By: David Kay 8 Comments

30 Oct

A cornerstone KCS quality measure is the Article Quality Index (AQI.) We calculate the AQI by sampling a handful of articles captured by licensed knowledge developers and checking them against an article quality checklist. If you sample five of my articles, and there are ten criteria on the checklist, you’ve checked 50 items. If I missed a total of two items across those 50, then my score is 100% – (2 / 50) = 96%. Not bad! We like to see individuals’ AQIs above 90%, or put more negatively, we like to see an error rate of less than 10%.

Of course, capturing articles is just one piece of KCS. The AQI doesn’t tell us if people are linking well, or capturing when they should be, or improving content. Perhaps it’s time to expand our vision and create a Resolution Quality Index (RQI.)

Instead of just sampling articles, let’s sample cases. In specific, let’s pick three different types of cases:

Cases with a link to existing knowledge
Cases with a link to newly-captured knowledge
Cases with no link to knowledge

For cases with a link to existing knowledge, we’ll look at three things. First, link accuracy: are the linked article(s) relevant, and is there one to Solve Loop content that describes the customer’s specific resolution? (Just linking to the user manual doesn’t count.) Second, improvement loss: was there an opportunity to update the article that should have been taken, but wasn’t? It’s not necessary to go on a witch hunt here, but look for giveaways like customer emails that say, “in your case, you have to download this file before performing step five,” or for information in the case that’s different from information in the article’s environment. Finally, link timeliness: if you can tell in your case tracking system, was searching and linking happening at the early on the case, or only after the customer’s issue had already been resolved? (HT to Devra Struzenberg for this idea.)

For cases with a link to newly-captured knowledge, we’ll apply our existing article quality checklist. We’ll also check capture timeliness: as with link timeliness, if our technology supports it, we’ll look for when the article content was captured, and how much it was edited post-call. Some post-call editing is inevitable, but Capture in the Workflow tells us that most of the information should be in place by the time the case is closed.

For cases with no link to knowledge, the question is, should there have been a link? If the answer is no—for example, if we were just re-issuing a license key or if the customer never responded to a request for information—that’s legitimate nonparticipation. But, if there was an article available that wasn’t linked, that’s reuse loss, and if one should have been created, that’s capture loss.

Having finished this sampling process, you’ll have an overall view of how well people are following the KCS problem resolution process. To help visualize this, look at this pie chart of cases:

If these ideas sound familiar, they should: this is the kind of analysis provided by the New vs. Known Study described in the KCS Practices Guide. What’s new, though, is using this like the AQI, as a coaching tool. Rather than just doing it once every six months, coaches or knowledge domain experts can sample a few of each kind of case to see if there’s a pattern of capture loss, reuse loss, or inaccurate reuse, and can provide feedback accordingly.

This does take more time, and a bit more subject expertise, than the traditional AQI process. But I think the coaching opportunities would be more than worth it.

ps – Thanks to my colleagues working on the KCS Practices Guide v5.3 update for a vigorous and informative conversation on this topic. You inspired this post!

Is Your KCS Really KCS?

By: David Kay 1 Comment

20 Aug

The good news is, KCS is getting more popular. The bad news is, lots of organizations say they’re doing KCS…but they’re actually doing something different. And, unsurprisingly, they’re not seeing the benefits they expect.

Here’s a quick video that you can use to find out if you’re on track with KCS:

And, here’s a printable copy of the checklist.

Please let us know what you think in the YouTube comments.

Hanging Up Your Strategic Framework: Sage Does it Right

By: David Kay 0 Comments

11 Jul

In our KCS workshops, we say that the Strategic Framework is the deliverable that’s easiest to push aside…and yet one of the most valuable if done right.

The Strategic Framework is a simple way of showing the value of KCS to the company, customers, and employees. Executives set high-level objectives for the organization: “scale the business by enabling service partners,” or “provide self-service that customers prefer to use,” or “give engineers more time to be engineers.” The Strategic Framework lists off how KCS will help achieve these objectives, how we’ll measure its success, and how we’ll hold ourselves accountable.

The Strategic Framework is really useful in executive discussions—program teams can be proactive about showing how they’re supporting strategic initiatives. They’re especially valuable when executives turn over, or during organizational change—new leaders love being asked, “here’s how we were supporting our old objectives…how do we need to change this, if at all, to align with your vision?”

Generally, the Strategic Framework is captured in a three-slide deck, with one table for the company, customers, and team members. But Sage North America just blew me away with an innovative way to share the Strategic Framework with their whole team: a huge banner they’re hanging throughout their support organizations.

Click for full-sized PDF

Sage has a very rich product portfolio, and naturally different teams in different locations have different cultures and priorities. For Sage, KCS has been a great “excuse” to pull together as a team and line up behind a common, organization-wide initiative. This banner is a way of reinforcing the common messages.

Sage started with an advantage: their leadership has been communicating effectively about the company’s core principles, and those values line up very nicely with the big ideas behind KCS. You’ll find the principles hanging in each conference room, and people seem to really pay attention to them, and to take them seriously. This made them a really natural hook for the Strategic Framework.

So, what would your KCS banner say?

(HT Ron Taylor, Melinda Gallagher, Carolyn Rose, and the whole Sage team for sharing this with the community!)

Leadership in Action: The KCS Commitment

By: David Kay 0 Comments

8 Jun

We wrapped up a KCS design workshop at Carestream Health yesterday. We closed with an exercise I love: the participants spent the last hour presenting what they’d learned, done, and planned to executives. This solidifies the learning, and it’s far more meaningful for executives to hear from the people who will be doing the work than from a consultant or program manager.

The team did a great job. Then, at the end, one of the execs, Arnaud Marie, started asking more questions. He asked to see their benefits slide again. “On a scale of one to five, where one means disagree and five means absolutely strongly agree, and something in between is something in between, hold up your fingers to show how much you believe these benefits will really happen.” The participants held their hands up, and looked around the room to see what the others had done. Everyone…everyone had held up five fingers.

Then Arnaud said, “There’s no wrong answer to this. You can say whatever you want and it’s totally OK.” He made eye contact to make sure people saw that he was serious. “Again, hold up your hands to show how committed you are to this program…1 is ‘no thanks,’ and 5 is ‘200%—when I get back to my office, and I’m busy with all my other work, I’m going to fight hard for this program, even when there are problems and setbacks.’” Hands went up, and again people looked around the room. It was all fives.

“OK, let’s make it official.” Arnaud went to our flip chart, and wrote a short phrase. “I want everyone here to sign it, and I’m going to keep it in my office. I’m going to sign it first.”

It was an electrifying moment. Having taken three minutes, zero dollars, a few carefully chosen words, and an action, a leader transformed the people in room from an enthusiastic group to a committed KCS army.

What have you done to inspire your colleagues to action? What can you do?

(HT to Arnaud for permission to share.)

New Offerings! (Or, A Blog Post That’s All About Us)

By: David Kay 0 Comments

31 May

Regular readers of this space know we generally like to talk about the interesting things other people are doing in the world of knowledge management, self-service, and social support. But we’ve been busy working on a number of new offerings, and we wanted to celebrate their launch today.

KCS Practices v5 Certification is now part of every KCS Foundations or KCS Design Workshop DB Kay delivers. The question we get asked most about our workshops is, “can I get certified now?” Prior to now, there wasn’t a very good answer. But now that the CSI’s KCS Academy has launched this new certification for program managers and line managers, we’ll leave time at the end of each workshop for a review session and the proctored exam.

A KCS Foundations Workshop, Bi-Coastal Style. It’s great to get the whole team on the same page, but sometimes that’s hard with distributed teams and tight travel budgets. We’ve teamed up with The Vergis Group to deliver a simultaneous KCS Foundations Workshops in San Francisco / Silicon Valley and Boston, July 10-12. You now have an opportunity for multiple members of your organization to attend the workshop closest to where they are located, while at the same time gaining the same knowledge, similar experiences and collaborating with local attendees. Learn how KCS can improve your current KM processes and transform your organization. Both classes will meet the same days and, on the final day, we will collaborate on our capstone exercises. You will get the benefit of two certified KCS v5 Trainers, two groups of attendees, and one tremendous experience.

A Virtual Classroom version of the KCS Foundations Workshop, starting August 13-16. We’ve had excellent success delivering KCS workshops to clients using virtual classroom technology, so we’ve decided to apply the same approach to our open enrollment workshop. Using web meeting software and a conference bridge, attendees interact with an experienced KCS v5 Verified instructor without ever leaving their desks. This allows everyone to gain the benefits of this KCS Foundations Workshop without impact to travel budgets.

KCS Publisher Certification in a Box. Whether you’re looking to reinvigorate your KCS program, motivate your team, recognize your stars, or just get everyone on the same page, KCS Publisher Certification gives your KCS program a boost. But, it can be complex to administer, and without the right refresher training, even experienced KCS staff are likely to fail the certification exam. DB Kay provides process management, communications, exam-prep training, review sessions, and proctored exam delivery, all for a simple per-person fee.

We hope you can join us for training, certification, and KM success. Let us know what you think!

KCS is a Whiteboard

By: David Kay 2 Comments

3 Apr

Source photo credit: iStockphoto

At a recent Consortium for Service Innovation team meeting, Adam Strong of Red Hat said something that really resonated with me: “KCS is a whiteboard.” I knew at once what he meant—and it’s a really powerful way of thinking and talking about KCS.

I don’t know about you, but there are few things in life as motivating as a clean whiteboard with a set of colored pens beneath, and maybe a pack of big sticky notes nearby. When I visit a company with lots of whiteboard space, I’m pretty sure we’ll get along well. There’s a sense of possibility about the big, blank expanse of board—a friendly challenge, an invitation to think up something interesting and capture it in a way that it can be communicated with others.

Perhaps the only thing more motivating than a clean whiteboard is one that’s in a room with other people who have ideas they want to share, too, with half-formed thoughts taking shape on the board as you collaborate in search of a shared vision, an vision too big and too diverse for any of you to have found on your own.

The eraser is really important. Whiteboards invite fearlessness, because it’s almost as much fun to erase and start over as it is to write on the board in the first place.

The lack of finesse is really important, too. Whiteboard drawings aren’t polished, keeping the focus on the ideas, not the beauty of their representation. Even the rough draft of this blog post I’m writing in Word now looks way too finished, with good kerning and a smooth left margin. If I didn’t know better, I’d think I were finished. Whiteboards never let you imagine you’re done.

So, I think Adam’s right: KCS is like a whiteboard.

KCS spurs creativity. The article structure sets the boundaries, but there’s limitless white space inside. If a customer asks you to solve a new problem, a knowledge article inspires you to unleash your creativity to solve it—maybe quickly, and maybe through a long journey of discovery. When you’ve solved the issue, the knowledge you acquired is up on the “knowledgebase whiteboard,” ready to share with others.
KCS invites collaboration. From informal discussions over a cubicle wall to war rooms convened to resolve critical customer issues, it’s critical that the work of the group is captured in articles as the discussion unfolds: collaboration is creation. I look forward to the day when all KM tools support Google Docs-style real-time collaborative editing.
KCS makes revisions natural. Knowledge is never done: in KCS, every use of an article is an opportunity to improve it, and make it more comprehensive. Just as we erase a word or shape on the whiteboard, and replace it with something more fitting, KCS encourages us to keep making articles, especially frequently used articles, ever better.
KCS emphasizes ideas over formatting. KCS articles aren’t like the brand-designed, tightly edited webpages that Marketing produces. But ask a customer if she wants glamour or a quick, accurate answer to her question, and the answer wins every time. The fact that KCS articles are spare and simple means they’re easy to extend and improve.

The only problem with whiteboards is, it’s tough to work with the information after the fact. (I should know: I have a smartphone full of pictures of whiteboards.) So if you see your customer-facing staff having an animated discussion around a whiteboard, encourage them to continue—and remind them that their good work deserves a better future than can be provided by a “Do Not Erase” sign.

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BTW, our Plano KCS Foundations workshop in April is nearly sold out—please sign up soon if you’re joining us. And we’re confirmed for the post-conference one day KCS workshop after TSW in Santa Clara—a perfect way to introduce a colleague (or yourself!) to the what, how, and why of KCS.

Communicating the What and the Why: Intuit Does it Right

By: David Kay 0 Comments

5 Mar

Effective, persistent communication is the cornerstone of KCS. Team members need to be engaged emotionally—to feel like they’re part of a big, important quest—and practically—knowing exactly what they need to do.

Rather than saying anything more about this, I’m going get out of the way and let one of our customers show you. Having participated in end-user training to kick off Wave I of a brand new KCS initiative, I was delighted to be cc:d on this fabulous email that program manager Joe Young of Intuit’s Virtual HR team sent to the new KCS candidates. My notes follow.

Congratulations! We have launched KCS for Intuit HR with an initial wave of nineteen participants. That’s pretty amazing to me. Just imagine how quickly we will be able build a central repository of shared knowledge with that many really knowledgeable people. (1)

KCS Mantras

Tight Focus on Specific Question  This will be hard for many of us. (2) KCS is not about writing articles that detail many variations. The focus is on that one question from that one person. If you did not include a detail in the chat, phone, or case, it does not belong in the article.

Good Enough  Perfection is the enemy of the good. Don’t dither and don’t agonize over the “right” wording. Get the essence of the issue into an article, save it, and move on. (3)

Create Articles “In the Moment”  When creating new articles, customer context is key. Use the words that the customer used in describing the issue. Don’t “improve” the wording. And don’t wait until you “have time to write.” You will lose that customer framing.

UFFA  Mindset shift. On every question that you get, walk through these steps:

Use It: Search for an article that addresses the question in [our tool] (4). If it exists, use the information. Capture the ID and paste in into the [incident tracking system] case.

Flag It / Fix It: If the article you find could be improved, Flag it for improvements (Candidates) or edit it directly (Contributors).

Add It: If you determine after searching that no article exists that answers this specific question, write one using [our authoring environment](4). Do it now, even if people are waiting on the phones or chat. Senior leadership (copied on this email) understands that our service levels will dip as we populate this new resource. The benefits we derive will pay back a hundred-fold. (5)

Training Materials for HR KCS

I had a request in the last training session to provide the decks we used for the online training. I almost attached to this email, and then realized that a better way to model the new behavior we want to see would be to post these files in our repository.

I have created an article that contains two training decks and the current version of the Content Guidelines. I am sure everyone on this email will have no trouble locating it. (6)

Job Aid

I have laminated versions of the Quick Reference sheet. It’s the first two pages of the Guideline document, two-sided. If you would like a copy to have at your workstation, let me know how to get it to you. (7)

Coaching Assignments

Expect to be contacted by your assigned KCS coach shortly, if this has not already happened. (8) [T]eam members should expect to spend an hour a week with their coach through the Candidate process. [People taking escalations in] the first wave will likely have more customized arrangements based on their situations. Look for further communication.(9) [List of coach assignments followed.]

David’s notes:

What a clear, compelling vision—who doesn’t want to be part of that?
It’s OK to acknowledge that we’re building new skills, and that it can be hard. This “sufficient to solve” guidance for Solve Loop content is, ironically, often hardest for your best and most thoughtful team members.
In its crispness, this paragraph models KCS style at its finest
In the original, this was an actual link to the appropriate tool. Nice.
When leadership acknowledges that they’re willing to take a short-term productivity hit, they rarely actually have to
It seems like a little bit of a trick, but putting information people want into the knowledgebase really is a good ice breaker.
Simple, helpful laminated cards with the quick reference guide are both useful and a tangible reminder of the program. This is especially useful for a highly distributed or homesourced group.
Often, after training, I feel like participants are still somehow waiting for permission to start doing KCS. Taking the practical step of setting up the first coach meeting often supplies the needed incentive to start.
No one communication, even one as good as this, does the job on its own. This message closes with a reminder to all of us that communication is the job that never ends in a KCS program.

ps – Know someone who is coming to TSW in Santa Clara? We’re running our popular one-day Introduction to KCS the day following, May 10^th, at the TSW site. Enjoy another day in California: send a colleague, or come join us yourself!

Hack Your Knowledgebase

By: David Kay 5 Comments

16 Feb

We all hate our knowledgebase tools sometimes. We might like the people we work with at the vendor, and there are those really cool features, but…seriously? I can’t just get a list of all the articles Joe has written? I can’t use bullets without ruining the formatting? I have to hit “publish” three times after I’m finished with the article? It makes you tear your hair out, and you sometimes get the impression vendors have no idea how their products are used in the real world.

As a knowledge program manager, every time you meet with a KCS coach, or sit down with a staff member, you get both barrels about the technology. “Search doesn’t work—why can’t it be like Google?” “It’s too cumbersome to author in the workflow.” “It takes a half hour to create a KB article even after you’ve captured the information in the case.”

It’s easy for consultants, industry pundits, and even program managers to say it shouldn’t matter that much—that many knowledge programs have succeeded with technology that’s no better, or even worse. It may be true, but it’s not very helpful to say to a complaining colleague.

Based on some recent experience with customers, I’d suggest a different approach. Tell your team to hack their knowledgebase.

No, I don’t mean hack in a bad way. I mean hack, like, figure out how to make it their own. Come up with new clever ways of using the system. Devise workarounds. Write a script. Show off, and have some fun! You have smart people in your organization…maybe all they need to use the tool better is permission, and encouragement?

As program managers, we helped implement the tool, and we built the training content, so we come to think of ourselves as the experts. But we’re not, really, at least, not compared with the people who use it every day. Here are some things I’ve seen end-users figure out, all within the last three weeks:

How to use a “hotkey text” feature to automatically paste a template into a new article (a workaround discovered by two different users in two different systems)
How to eliminate rich text formatting problems by slightly changing the content standard
Metadata entry that can be skipped, because no one ever looks at it
How to generate “reports” that aren’t available in the reporting system by cleverly using an administrative interface
How to keep a shared stash of article IDs to link for common issues

These MacGyver moves all came about because users were frustrated with the tool, and rather than complaining, they rolled up their sleeves and did something about it. As a program manager, you’re not always in a position to figure this stuff out. But you can prod and encourage would-be hackers, recognize their contributions to the program, and most importantly, make sure that everyone on the whole team knows when a colleague has come up with a better way to do things.