From “What is KM?” to Trusted Advisor in Four Years | Donovan Helminiak of KTGY

Thank you, Chris. All right, so I'm going to start with a small experiment here. Imagine, if you will, people at your firm. Think about them for a second and ask and you're putting them on the spot asking the single question, what does a knowledge manager do? Yeah, so I did that and here's what some of the responses I got. Oh, man, this is hard. I don't know. The library of just all our digital.

They manage company databases, manages knowledge and information. They collect data and put it together somehow so that we can find it.

You know, I think there's so many different parts and pieces to our business. Every aspect of it has information that needs to be gathered and stored and then be able to be referenced.

Is in charge of disseminating information and knowledge throughout the company so that employees are aware of our resources.

Helping us collect all the information from all of our knowledge or subject matter.

Matter experts tries to identify, collect and curate our experiences and amplify that information in a way that aligns with our company's culture, that allow us to be better at what we do because knowledge is power.

So again, these are just a few of the responses I got. I had quite a few others. But the idea is that today I'm going to talk about my journey as the first knowledge manager at ktgy and also to talk about the three things I learned along the way. So a little bit about myself. As Chris had mentioned, I have kind of been in the helping knowledge flow in some form or fashion as a corporate trainer, as a intranet guy, working in internal communications. I, I even had a title once called a performance technologist. So and I've worked in the automotive industry, the mortgage industry, and I've been in the AEC space for almost a decade now. So a little bit about KTGY. It's an architecture and planning firm. There are seven offices, six in the United States, seven in India. We have 400 employees. We are primarily residential planning with mixed use types of projects. And I kind of want to start my journey four years ago, almost exactly today because I was here two weeks on the job, literally at this conference, sitting in that table back there. And I thought it would be a good place to kind of start and talk, talk about my journey so far. So I found out that this is a great community. I found my tribe actually. Of all the people that are actually doing and really excited about the things we're talking about, I mean, how many raise their hand? How many people have actually learned something in the last two days? Hopefully there's a Lot of hands, right? I just had copious notes. I had so much information boggled in my head. I'm like, oh, my gosh, this is gonna be so, so exciting. I can't believe that I'm here. Learning from people that have already gone further in their journey than I have so far paved the way for me to see what's possible. And, yeah, so I feel bad for my boss because I had a really long talk after that. So I got back. I said, okay, where can I start digging? It's kind of like what knowledge managers do. We like to dig. And I did know a few things coming right on board. One, knowledge management was a new term to our firm. So I was a new guy that came in, and I had to kind of start educating people. What is it that I do? I also needed to show that what kind of value can I bring to the firm? But I also wanted to make sure that I was finding those problems. What are the quick wins we could find or what are the problems we have that I would like to start digging into? And one of the areas that I knew that was gonna be, that was an initiative that came when I came on was finding out who needed our project information. Where was it? Why were we talking about having issues with it? And what I found out was that we had a central tool. Deltec. I'm sure some of you have heard of it, but nobody really trusted it. It was kind of just that thing that finance kind of used, but no one really wanted to touch it. It was ugly. Whatever. Sorry, Deltec. Not really. And one of the things that I found was that in my digging and research, I found out that our marketing team actually had a lot of this information, had a lot of things going on. And I said, hey, you know what? This is a good idea. You got all this information. So marketing is saying, yes, we have all this cool information about our projects. And I was like, yes, awesome. This is exactly what I'm looking for. And they were talking about how they need it and all that stuff, but they just didn't trust where it should have gone, which is Deltec for us. And so I started working with them, and I said, okay, hey, you know what? I have an idea. Why don't we. I said, yeah, awesome. I have a project. And I was like, yeah, let's go. I'm ready. Let's start tackling this problem. So. So I went to them and I said, okay, here's the plan. I'm going to take all that stuff that you guys have in your Spreadsheets. And I'm going to take it out, put it in Dell Tech. You guys are going to go there, start using it. It's going to be awesome. Trust me, it's all good. Yeah. So I started seeing some kind of weird reactions coming from them, you know, maybe not returned emails. And they started saying, who is this guy and why is he changing all our stuff? I mean, we're happy where we are. So that's one of the things I learned really quick. You gotta establish trust first before kind of just going and digging and changing people's process. And this is true to that. I found myself looking at that circle of trusting, not being in it. So I needed to find a way to get inside that circle of trust. So start over. So anyway, I said, okay, let's step back and try this again. Sorry, didn't mean to come on so strong. Let's talk about your challenges. What are you really dealing with? What are the aspirations you have for marketing and where are we going with this? And working with them several months, just trying to understand what they're looking at, working with the data that they were asking to pull and all that kind of stuff. And ended up pointing out a single question that they get all the time. So I simplified it. I said, what are the projects you do all the time? Where were we doing projects? And they get this question all the time, right? They just say, okay, well, we're gonna go to our spreadsheets, look it up, let's see where we can pull all the data for what we did in LA or some other place. And it was a cumbersome process. And I said, okay, well, why do you, you know, everybody has to come to you to look for this information. I said, okay, what if we created a way to take all that data and say, let's just take that, just the locations of our projects, put it in Deltec, and then also start to fill in the gaps because, you know, they only have the stuff that they care about. But it's also stuff that all the projects we have, that may not be the sexy projects, but it's. We still did the clients we were working with the stuff we're still doing right now. So what we did was we actually took all that data in, but also asked the PMs to make sure they're putting all that in their addresses into Deltec. And then also we got really creative and just started Googling our own projects. So what I ended up with was a interactive map that the result of just taking our addresses and putting Into Delltech. We'll pull that data out and show you. Here is a visualization of where we are doing business. Here are the projects we've done. Now we can filter this by clients, by type, office work, all that stuff in our studios, you'll notice that there is a blob out there in the ocean. It's actually the Bermuda Triangle. So if you find your project in there, it means that we don't have any data about it. So you might want to let us know. So I think I'm on the right path now. Working with marketing, they're starting to trust knowing that things can happen, things, you know, this is what knowledge management can do. It can help you take that weird process that we're doing or that hard thing that you were answering and saying, how is a better way to do that? How can we actually give the tool back? Or how can we give that information back to the people that actually need it, like our business development teams and our principals who are going out and talking to the clients. There's also other times where when you're working and digging, you want to, you know, there's times where you're looking at more sensitive information. For instance, I'm sure, like a lot of the firms here, we do an all hands meeting once a year talking about how we've done as a company. And one of the areas that they do this in is our cfo. She talks about how we're doing with our financials, who we're working with, which might be word out there and a few pieces of information. One of the things that I got out of it was when I was sitting there, I saw that our CFO was getting some questions and they were like, well, what makes up that pie chart? How do you define that as a slide? It's really hard to show that. It's really hard to explain that in a visual way. And so I had an aha moment, which is kind of sometimes an oh moment for others. And I decided I was going to take this and say, you know what, let me talk to my boss. I report to the COO of our company, John, and I went to him and I said, hey, you know, who should I talk to? Who should I be discussing this with? And seeing if I have an idea about taking our financial data and being able to kind of display in a better way, a better visual. Another way we can say, hey, why don't we, you know, make those decisions as they're happening? Why do we have to wait once a year to actually see it? And he told me, go check it out, you know, go talk to the cfo Brittany. I said, okay, well, I'm not sure about anybody else in the room. Maybe there's some CFOs here. If I were to walk into that cubicle and say, hey, can I just get the keys to all our data, financial data, and just kind of mess with it and see what happens. Yeah, probably get laughed out, not just at a cubicle, but out of the office. And so it was really important to create that connection and say, okay, how do I connect with the cfo, the new guy on the block, and say, okay, so now I'm using John as my connection because he has a connection to her. And so the three of us had that meeting. How can knowledge management bring value to what she does and the information she's trying to share? And so after that meeting, it was up to Brittany and I to continue that conversation and make sure that we're having a better conversation about what's possible. I talked to her about that time at the state of the company, and she's like, yes, yeah, I get it. It was really hard. And we said, okay, what if we created an interactive place where those people can get that information when they need it, especially their decision makers? And she said, yeah, I'm on board. So what we ended up with is a interactive dashboard. And the dashboard allowed us to put it out there so people can actually use it to help make decisions or understand where our business is going. And one kind of footnote about keeping trust. Don't show real numbers or information to potential competition. So anyway, circle of trust. So circle of trust. So now I found myself working with marketing and our cfo where we're doing really great things together. And, you know, that makes me happy. So what have I learned so far about keeping trust? Don't come on too strong. Especially, you know, again, two weeks on the job came here, oh, my gosh, there's so much we can do. So exciting. But you gotta make sure you establish that trust first and work with them, have that credibility first. Find your advocates. So it's really important when I came on board that there was some people that knew what knowledge management actually was. And I was searching them out, looking for them, making sure that they're the ones that I'm going to be working with and having them help me tell others what we can be doing and leverage your sponsor when you can't do that. Correct. Direct connect. Make sure your sponsor is there doing what you need, creating that connection that you need. And be as transparent as possible. That's part of the keeping trust part. Right. So when you're going through the work, when we're looking at the financial data and making sure that I'm taking along the ride with me, I just didn't disappear for a couple months, come back and say, here it is. We want iterations, and make sure we had a constant conversation about who, how do we roll it out, who should we give it to, and so forth. So it feels like I'm making progress. Awesome. I'm moving forward. I'm making impact here. And then, uh, oh, what have you done for me lately? Question came up. Yeah. So one of the challenges is that, you know, when I came on board, I knew there were some bigger initiatives that I can tackle and say, you know what? This is gonna be something that we, as a, you know, as a KM can do to make really big impact. But what I lost sight of was that we needed to also kind of bring people along the journey with us that may have not been affected by the actual thing I was working on. And that's where I learned my second lesson here was creating a balanced work portfolio, meaning that it's okay to work on those bigger initiatives, but you also want to have those quick wins in between. And one of those things that I thought that I should have done is kind of paused every once in a while and say, okay, let's make sure. Poke my head up every once in a while. Because when you start digging, sometimes it's hard to poke out of that hole and say, hey, what's going on? So I want to make sure that we also are doing some of those quick wins. And one of the influences I had coming on was I was going to be the educator and influencer of our intranet named Connect. Kind of wondering where they got that name. Anyway, so when we went to Go ahead and so when I came on board, our Internet was actually launched a year before I came on. And one of the things that I noticed right away was not everybody realized how to use Connect. How do they leverage it as a tool within our organization? It was great. I mean, it was there. It had all the right things there, all the components we can post, we can share things. Right. It had great information on there, but a lot of people didn't quite understand how to leverage it. How did they use it as a tool on their. Their daily lives? So what I did is I actually reached out to the community, this community here, and to Knowledge Architecture to identify an intranet improvement project, IIP for short. And what I found out, what I wanted to do with this quick project, hopefully was to be able to say, how do I drive people to this content? How do I get people to think about Connect as a tool that they can use? And one of the things we came up with is the who knows Hashtag campaign. And what this is is just simply asking a question on Connect may seem so foreign, but it was actually a very easy thing to do. So you're telling me I just type a question in a post, put the hashtag who knows and then somebody will just answer that? Yeah, that's actually kind of what we were expecting. So what we ended up doing though is putting a little bit of guardrails around that, meaning that we said use the hashtag. But also I asked people that were the go to people of each office or studio and said, hey, can you follow that hashtag to make sure that you're aware of that, of people asking questions? And then I also put a standard on there saying, hey, we're going to make sure that any question that comes in is going to have an answer within 24 working hours. I'm sorry, a response. Wish it was 24 hours and an answer sometimes, but at least a response. And then we started and then we'll make sure that that answer gets out there for you. The last step was to close the loop. Ask the people that once they've got the answer to re put that message back onto Connect to make sure the client closed that loop. We're working on that last part a little bit. It's still work in progress on that. But what I can say is after three years of being able to do this, we've had a, our board of directors, our technical staff, and even our project managers go and actually ask questions and have gotten great responses from many different parts of the firm. And we can only have done this by leveraging a central knowledge tool like Connect, which is our intranet. So that's kind of how I probably got deemed. Are you the intranet guy then? You know, because. So now I was like, all right, I've kind of showed some value, done some quick wins, some high exposure to a lot of different people. Sometimes you'd have to also look at those big, hairy, audacious goals that you want to do. And I really knew that when I came on board, one of the things that I had in my bag of tricks was working internal communications. And one of the things that I wanted to do was make sure that our company did well with it. And there was an unwritten rule about anything that was really, really important. Kind of just got pushed down through the ranks and got to us. But there's no standard. There wasn't anybody saying, hey, this is how we're supposed to do it. So I worked with our leadership to create an internal communication strategy. So first we identified our key players, who owns this process, who should be the people that we talk to and say, hey, this should be a thing at ktgy. And then we wanted to talk about what are we going to talk about, what are the campaigns, what are the things we're going to focus on. And then we actually documented the process. We actually wrote it down, said who should be creating that post or creating that communication, who should approve it, how should it be done. And then we actually tried to do some accountability around it by creating an editorial calendar. And then we also did some training to make sure that our stakeholders understood how to use the tool from connect to writing a proper email and making sure that things are getting communicated well. And then last but not least is definitely measuring success. Now, I'll say this right now, this is definitely an infant stage. Our bar is very low, so meaning that if there's anybody communicating beyond the urgent thing, we're actually doing pretty well. So what came of this actually was a pretty simple grid, if you will, to kind of help people understand what channels they should use and what we should do. So the stuff on the right there you see the critical urgent and the non critical but urgent stuff we did pretty well on. Right? That wasn't my main focus. The stuff on the left was my favorite, my focus. How do we make sure we have a cadence of what we're talking about, what are the things we're doing and also creating that culture of communication by also just not that critical or urgent. But it's something that does help us as a company understand who we are. And I have to say again, the successes have been great. Our chairman of the board has been posting about and using our intranet to talk about how we're going to change how we work. So Alternative Workweek was a big thing for us last year. Big promotions that happened within the company, our CEO doing that and our head of HR talking about an internal campaign, about internal Women's Day. So it's International Women's Day. So it's a lot of things that we do to make sure that people are aware of and establishing this process to make sure it's a thing. So what have I learned about creating a balanced work portfolio? Quick projects are good all the time. You want to make sure that as you're doing those bigger initiatives to step out. Sometimes some of this can be focused on bigger initiatives. Meaning, like the. Who knows? I would even argue that that helped us have the conversation about leveraging Connect as our internal platform for communication for the entire office. We actually removed the all email support. So actually nobody can send an email to everybody in the entire company. Make sure you establish that circle of trust first before you dig though, because that is really important. If you don't, people just look at you funny and walk away. So how do I know I'm still on the right path? How do I know where I'm going? This is something that is not new territory for me. You know, sometimes coming into a company with a new title kind of gets scary, but it's fun. But I knew that coming in, I needed to identify the company goals, the culture, my advocates, where can we make success happen? And what I found was the other thing I learned pretty quickly was also defining what matters. What are the things that we should be working on as knowledge managers, going into the field and digging? How do we know what matters most? What are the things that we should be focused on? And one of the things that I found was that sometimes it's kind of like having kids. When you are working on a very specific problem or you're looking at the direction you want to go into and you think that, like kids, you're like, oh, I know, I knew what to expect having kids. I kind of knew where I was going until all of a sudden they have this awesome power to just change everything you ever thought about where you were going in life and what was happening. So it's kind of like, okay for walking into a company and saying, I think I got it, I think I know what I'm growing. But you want to make sure you're learning about the business before you just start digging and making sure that you have understanding about that. So when is it the right time to have a formal plan? It depends. It depends on where you are in your KM journey. I think it can come organically, and it should. But it also depends on where you are. When people ask, where was my strategic plan? I can say, please see our company's strategic plan and goals, because that is what I align to. That is where I focus to. And that's where our company, you know, if I have anything that's coming up and I say, you know, what are you working on? Well, I can say I'm working on these main Four areas. The thing that I'm working on is helping our team members communicate better or learn better or it's helping us understand our clients better. So we're making sure that we're servicing them to the fullest we can or to our financials, understanding how we're visualizing ourselves and how do we make better decisions faster around that. So where do I go next? How do I know what the next thing, the next great thing to do? And this is where, again, I guess, stress about working with your sponsor, the person that you may report to, or someone that has a lot of influence in the company, meaning they are the ones that are your advocate, the major advocate of driving knowledge management in the firm. But you also need to make sure that you're making those connections with your advocates and working with them to make sure that they're telling you and working with them to understand what is important to them. Because again, as a whole, we understand better where we're going, what we need to do, what are the bigger challenges, and that's how we find out where we're going next. So, defining what matters most. I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah. Defining what matters most. What I've learned so far about is seeking out the company goals as fast as you can. Make sure that you know what they are, because those are the things that are going to keep you going. They're going to be, hey, you were working on this one project that really didn't mean anything to anybody. Why are you doing it? So making sure that you're going in the right direction. Connect with your advocates and consistently connect with them. Make sure that they are hearing you out. They're going to be your guiding light to knowing what's the hot topic today. But don't force also your strategic plan, because it should be coming organically. And as you learn more about the business, you're able to be more informed in how and where we can make more impact. But definitely constantly check in, check in with your sponsor to make sure again, that they're the ones that are saying, okay, here's what's important to us right now. Let's change course. Because that happens sometimes. So even though I'm four years into my journey so far, I know I have a lot to learn. But I will stress that if there's any sponsors that are looking to bring in a knowledge management team into their firm or start that process, to know that it's gonna take some time. This is only four years into it for me, and then we're still learning. And also know that anything you put on that job description, by the way, is gonna change within a year or two. Mine did also know that if you're a knowledge manager, if you're a knowledge manager and you are just starting out your journey, it's maybe challenging, it might seem over the top of the hill there, but you're knowing that what you're doing is making a great impact is totally worth it. Thank you. It.