Christopher Parsons describes practical first steps for knowledge management in AEC firms. He recommends starting with an "Essential Content Checklist" to consolidate basic intranet content (pay, holidays, technology), assembling accurate employee data to build trust, and aligning KM interventions to strategic aims (culture change, upskilling, design discussions). Staffing is usually a mix of an executive sponsor, one or two champions, and several part-time contributors rather than only full-time FTEs.
Chapters
What have you seen as far as kind of like minimum viable product from a staffing standpoint to make this work in your favor? So we have an asset we developed several years ago called the Essential Content Checklist. And that's kind of what it sounds like. I think we developed it when we had 100 clients and we basically looked across those firms that were successful and we tried to just kind of just generally get what are the kind of key pieces that every AEC firm should have on their intranet. It gets done into very basic stuff like when do I get paid, what are our holidays, what's our technology, all that stuff that's just kind of like a floor. We're like just do that because the second you turn one of these systems on, that's the stuff people are going to reliably always search for and find and need, need to get access to. Otherwise your HR department and your marketing people and your IT people and operational, they're just going to get inundated with the same, same kind of questions. So like that's really low hanging fruit at most firms. They have it somewhere. And so this checklist ends up becoming a treasure hunt. Maybe some of it lives off in this other old Internet, maybe some of it's on the network share, maybe some of it's all just sent via email. And so a lot of it is consolidating that, updating what's missing and kind of bringing it up to good level of quality and then continuing to maintain it going forward. And then we generally recommend that firms just get really good basic employee data together. So who does what, who works in what office? Like really simple stuff. And the reason that's important is it's not that hard to do. But it builds trust in your community that your data is good. And that's what you want to start doing pretty quickly, is establishing trust. Then it starts getting into some pretty interesting territory. So I talked about knowledge sharing before, maybe, and this is where the it depends happens. Maybe what the most important thing to do at your company is you have a new strategic plan, your leadership is trying to steer the culture in a new direction. There's just something kind of big happening at the company and you want to use knowledge management as a way to drive that message through the organization. So everyone's aligned, they know what the important things are. Maybe it's you have a really robust design culture or you want to have more of a robust design culture and you really want people sharing stuff from the model shop, people sharing stuff from project tours or site visits or talking about crits. So then you start picking on who do you want your company to be in a year from now or two years or three years from now. And you work backwards. So like, what are the knowledge management interventions to make that happen? I mentioned the upskilling thing from B2. So like we need to get these health care people up to speed. So it does vary very quickly. And because the goals vary, then the resourcing and the staffing vary quite a bit too. If what you're trying to do is get a design conversation going, you can imagine that's a very different set of resources than trying to improve quality or trying to upskill employees. You usually have like an executive sponsor, so they sit at the board or management team level. They're the connection to the knowledge management team of like what matters and what doesn't. So they can keep the knowledge management team from chasing science projects or things that sound interesting. They can say like, this is the important thing. I would spend time here. You usually have a champion or two who orchestrate the work of a bunch of other people. And then depending on what the initiative is, you could have five. We're talking part now. This isn't like generally full time roles. Like this is like part of somebody's job. I think you need a good clear structure. But I think the more people you have involved in general is better than having. If you could have just like a couple FTEs doing this all the time, like I actually don't think that's great. I think it's better to have this be piece and parts of people's role with a good sponsor and a good champion or two kind of just overseeing the machinery to make sure that it stays on strategy and that it's operating efficiently.
