Category Archives: Coaching

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Answering an Important Question: “So How Can I Work With You?”

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Lately, several people who are interested in the Working with SMEs and Finding Your SMEs methodology have asked me, “So how can we work with you? After we buy the book, then what? Am I on my own to figure this out for my company?”

You are not on your own! The books are good starting points for understanding how and why to work with your internal corporate expertise. However, I offer workshops, presentations and consulting packages to help you and your team pull through the ideas, execute on them and get results. If you are in the Philadelphia area, AmpTech in Malvern is sponsoring a public workshop next Friday, January 13 from 8:30 a.m. to noon, 3 Clear Strategies for Finding, Capturing & Transferring Retiring Expertise. You can register here.

If you want to work directly, here are a few ways I can help you today:

  1. Presentations for your organization including a one-hour overview of how to work with subject matter experts geared toward subject matter experts and instructional designers, and a half- or full-day session for decision makers who are concerned about losing valuable corporate knowledge.
  2. Ongoing consulting to pull through finding your experts, working with them and helping you move the process toward completion that includes presentations, relevant workshops to meet your particular circumstances and one-on-one sessions with key personnel.
  3. Do-it-yourself workshops on Working with SMEs and Finding Your SMEs that include presentation materials and a detailed facilitator guide with or without train-the-trainer assistance from someone on my team.

I also have a few projects in development this year to help expand my reach to help more people more easily.

  1. A handbook, Working in SMEville: Tips, Tools and Techniques for Subject Matter Experts and the People Who Work with Them, will be available for sale by the end of January. It is designed to help the training department and subject matter experts with some practical advice drawn from the two books organized quickly and simply in one place.
  2. This blog will continue on Tuesdays, and I am working on creating a weekly podcast that will run on Thursdays in this space with conversation and advice that addresses issues presented by clients and readers. If you sign up for weekly emails, you will receive the blogs and other notifications.
  3. Video classes and presentations on individual topics, both on-demand and live.

Admittedly, the two books can be used as working documents with charts, checklists, diagrams and explanations of the theory behind them for some intrepid individuals to implement on their own. However, I have developed workshops that tie the pieces together and take you through the various processes. And I would be very pleased to work with you to make the plans work inside your organization.

If you are interested in exploring ways we can work together, contact me at workingwithsmes@gmail.com and let’s schedule a discussion.

 

 

 

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Does Your 2017 Strategic Business Plan Include Retention of Your Experts? Public Workshop on Capturing and Transferring Corporate Knowledge

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Your strategic business plan for 2017 must include a comprehensive assessment of your internal corporate expertise, and a plan for retaining critical assets. If it doesn’t, it’s not too late.

Join us for a second presentation of this public workshop in the Philadelphia area on Friday January 13 based on the book Finding Your SMEs: Capturing Knowledge from Retiring Subject Matter Experts in Your Organization Before They Leave, where we will look at the kinds of expertise you need to capture and how to make those decisions. We had a lot of great participation at the December session, and we look forward to another exciting exchange of ideas.

I hope you can be there. It will be so much better with you. Here are the details.

Topic: Working with Subject Matter Experts: 3 Clear Strategies for Finding, Capturing & Transferring Retiring Expertise.

Date: January 13, 2016

Time: 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

Place: Malvern, Pa

Cost: $30 (lunch will be provided)

Seating is limited to allow maximum participation by attendees. We recommended that you send more than one person from your organization to facilitate discussion within your company.

A nearly perceptible anxiety surrounds the retiring baby boom generation in corporate America today. Many thriving businesses began in the post World War II manufacturing boom. As those knowledge workers leave for the sunny golf courses of Florida, they take with them lifetimes of knowledge and skills that some businesses will never replace.  But it doesn’t have to be that way for your organization.

Join us for the second presentation of this workshop on January 13. Click here to register.

Our host for the event, AmpTech, serves as a provider of expertise for innovators, entrepreneurs and startups.

AmpTech Commercialization Center

As part of the Greater Philadelphia Entrepreneurship and Innovation Ecosystem, AmpTech maintains a collaborative environment where start-ups, service providers, investors, academia and local businesses can join together to get products and services to market FASTER. AmpTech bridges the gap for start-ups and corporate innovators by providing a place to develop products quickly and under one roof. AmpTech provides rapid prototyping capabilities establishing an opportunity to pilot various technologies before market launch.

31 General Warren Blvd, Malvern, PA 19355, USA
info@amptech.org   |   484-320-8938
http://amptech.org/

Join us for this popular workshop Friday, January 13 in suburban Philadelphia where we will be discussing managing corporate knowledge assets. Click here to register. Lunch and a copy of the book Finding Your SMEs: Capturing Knowledge from Retiring Subject Matter Experts in Your Organization Before They Leave are included in the registration fee.

 If you have questions, you may also contact me directly at workingwithsmes@gmail.com.

 

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Subject Matter Expert or Poser?

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I love doing live workshops, webinars and seminars because the questions and discussions are usually a great place to further explore the subject matter of subject matter experts. A discussion at a Working with SMEs workshop the other day led to an issue that deserves a quick mention – and that is, how do you know if you are working with a true subject matter expert or if you are dealing with a poser?

Let’s define our terms, and that will get us where we need to go pretty quickly.

A subject matter expert (SME) is somebody who has dedicated about 10,000 hours to learning a subject. In working years, that translates into about five full-time years of effort. People who earn PhD’s, for example, dedicate effort to research and working in a very small area of study for least as many years. They are expected to be able to defend what they know to a jury of their peers and then write several hundred pages of documented effort showing their work.  A Harvard Business Review article from 1989, The Experts in Your Midst by Michael J. Prietula and Herbert A Simon, defines a SME as someone who is analyzing and applying about 50,000 disparate pieces of information in their head at one time. It goes mostly without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, they know their subject well enough that their analysis and ability to problem solve is mostly happening at a subconscious level.

An expert in business and industry who hasn’t earned an official PhD  might have dedicated 5, 10 or 20 years perfecting their craft at a machine that manufactures a specific item or part, or by learning from their customers while meeting their needs. That’s true expertise, too.

What is a poser? For that, I defer to Merriam Webster. Definition #2 is “a person who poses.” The etymology of the word is “pose” and the first known use is 1888. A person who poses as a subject matter expert is not a subject matter expert but is donning the position. How do you know if that is what you are dealing with?

One of my mentors, the late turnaround  artist Elmer Gates, could sniff them out pretty quickly. When he took over a company, he called his direct reports into his office and asked them some basic questions about their lines of business such as how to defend their sales projections. He asked detailed questions about their customers’ businesses. If they didn’t have the hard data, he asked them to go find it. When his direct reports drilled down into the organization and found the answers, the actual knowledge usually resided one or two levels down.

Your actual experts are doing the work every day. They understand their machines, they understand your customers. Posers tend to be the people who know how to play the political game and leverage the actual expertise of others.

So when you are dealing with someone who puts themselves out as a subject matter expert, ask for detail. Look for the data. I read an article recently that stated an expert is usually known by their peers, but that is occasionally untrue. A master politician can accrue a lot of political capital to defend their job and bluff their way through a meeting. If you ask your subject matter expert for detail and they don’t have it, you may have a great politician or people person on your hands, but you don’t have an expert. You have a poser. Elmer Gates usually sent those people a pink slip because they added no actual value to the organization.

Spend your valuable, finite resources capturing  and retaining irreplaceable knowledge in your company, and make sure you are talking to actual experts by asking the hard questions and looking for detail. People with great people skills and master politicians are great to have around and companies need them, but they are a lot easier to replace.

Join us for a workshop Friday, January 13 in suburban Philadelphia where we will be discussing this and related issues. Click here to register. Lunch and a copy of the book Finding Your SMEs: Capturing Knowledge from Retiring Subject Matter Experts in Your Organization Before They Leave are included in the registration fee.

 

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Anticipating Training Needs for the U.S. Manufacturing Sector

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Certainly, more than at any time in recent memory, we are in uncertain times. A surprising U.S. election result… Brexit… Cuba. You can feel the global shift. Among all the hype and hyper-nationalism may appear a chance to change course from outsourcing jobs from the U.S. to bringing jobs back.

The U.S. can’t continue our slide into deficit spending without the substantial amount of productivity needed to support that spending. And we certainly can’t sustain a trade deficit that has us buying more from foreign countries than we’re selling to them.

For some companies, this shift signals opportunity. With opportunity comes costs. Some of the costs of bringing back manufacturing jobs will include the cost to train or re-train workers. 

The November issue of TD, ATD’s monthly talent development magazine, featured an article on the cost of training workers. The ATD 2015 study sponsored by Bellevue University and the Training Associates included more than 300 organizations. The study analyzed annual per capita training costs in 4 sectors: finance/insurance/real estate, manufacturing, information and software, and public administration. The average direct expenditure overall for all sectors was $1,252 per employee. However, the expenditure for manufacturing workers at $503 per employee lagged far behind the training costs in the other sectors. The low rate of training expenditure on manufacturing employees was attributed to several factors, among them “less specialized and less rapidly changing development needs” and the fact that more manufacturers are located in China, India and Mexico where “the costs of developing and delivering training may be much lower than in the United States  or other advanced economies.”

If an enterprise is to survive today and thrive tomorrow, it must always be alert for changes in the environment. That includes being able to interpret current events in light of historical trends.  If companies can anticipate a shift to increased manufacturing plants in the U.S., companies will also be gearing up to train those workers.

Right now, I am seeing a perceptible anxiety among manufacturers regarding losing their experienced, legacy employees to retirement and their inability to find qualified employees to replace them. If we anticipate a shift to more manufacturing jobs in the U.S., the need to find and train workers for this sector will become more acute. And, looking at the TD study, it will also become more costly.

The goal of training is to increase the productivity of employees. With this in mind, it is time for companies to consider the kind of training that will support new U.S. manufacturing workers with rapid uptake, skill reinforcement and to do it cost efficiently.

Join us for a workshop this Friday, December 16 in suburban Philadelphia where we will be discussing this and related issues. Click here to register. Lunch and a copy of the book Finding Your SMEs: Capturing Knowledge from Retiring Subject Matter Experts in Your Organization Before They Leave is included in the registration fee.

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Preserving Expertise: Essential for Entrepreneurs and Early Startups

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***WHOOPS! WE JUST DISCOVERED A GLITCH IN OUR AUTOMATED EMAIL SYSTEM.  IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO SIGN UP FOR THE EMAIL LIST, PLEASE EMAIL ME DIRECTLY AT workingwithsmes@gmail.com WITH YOUR FIRST AND LAST NAMES AND EMAIL ADDRESS, AND I WILL MANUALLY ADD YOU TO THE LIST. I APOLOGIZE FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE!***

Are you an entrepreneur or startup at the beginning of your business and product lifecycle?  If so, you might think that it isn’t yet time to worry about cataloging your internal expertise, after all, you are still making it up as you go along. Right? Half right.

The truth is that there is no better time to start to memorialize your business processes and product development methods than from the very beginning. In fact, if you take knowledge management seriously from day one, you are less likely to find yourself in the position that you have to worry about losing key employees. And let’s face it, if you are a young business, you may find some of your talent will be wooed away by competitors or some other interesting project because, by nature, people attracted to startups are adventurous individuals who are often just passing through.

Knowledge management is as important for your young business as for a mature organization.

Knowing a few essential tactics for managing your expertise and implementing knowledge management tactics early and systematically can help you avoid playing catchup later.

Consider the following.

  1. People: Some of the best and brightest people who will ever cross your threshold are with you today, bringing their ideas to the party. Make sure you capture the nuances of their contributions to preserve the details of what you hope will become your competitive advantage.
  2. Processes: By implementing a knowledge management protocol in your early stages, you will have a system for capturing knowledge as it is developed, storing it in a way that it can be easily retrieved while you are working and doing it in a way that is user friendly as you onboard your first employees. When you have the technology and system in place upfront, you establish a culture of learning.
  3. Business Acumen: The habit of preserving your processes and methods from day one indicates to investors and early employees that you plan to stick around. It also demonstrates that you are forward-thinking.

Storytime

I was brought on to an early stage startup to document its innovative software application that it hoped to sell to large corporations. The idea was very creative and had a lot of potential to streamline what was then a very cumbersome, manual process. The company founders had attracted some early stage funding from a public entity after undergoing stringent scrutiny. As I began to document the software for training purposes, I uncovered many serious glitches in the program that made it non-functional for actual customers. It turned out that the developers and early business partners could only run tests, but it would not work for in an external environment. Instead of writing software documentation, I spent three frustrating (and ultimately uncompensated) months uncovering the problems and working with the software developers to try to correct the problem.

Moral of the story: When the owner tried to write a technical manual for instructions, it couldn’t be done because the software didn’t work in the real world. Creating training and documenting processes can help you uncover problems before your customers do!

What You Can Do about Knowledge Management as an Early Stage Venture

Learn how to proactively think about knowledge management early in your business lifecycle because all successful businesses today are learning organizations.

Next Friday, December 16, I’ll be in Malvern, PA in Philadelphia’s western suburbs for a public workshop where we’ll be talking about how to determine your competitive advantages, work with your subject matter experts, and scan the environment to preserve your edge going forward.

If you are part of a startup or an entrepreneur, it would be great to see you there to add your perspective to the discussions.  Register here.

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Public Workshop in the Philadelphia Area: 3 Clear Strategies for Finding, Capturing & Transferring Retiring Expertise

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What are your plans for preserving your internal corporate expertise in 2017? Join us for a public workshop on December 16 based on the book Finding Your SMEs: Capturing Knowledge from Retiring Subject Matter Experts in Your Organization Before They Leave, where we will look at the kinds of expertise you need to capture and how to make those decisions.

Here are the details.

Topic: Working with Subject Matter Experts: 3 Clear Strategies for Finding, Capturing & Transferring Retiring Expertise.

Date: December 16, 2016

Time: 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

Cost: $30 (lunch will be provided)

An additional session in January will be available to accommodate holiday schedules. Seating is limited. Recommended that you send more than one person from your organization to facilitate discussion within your company.

A nearly perceptible anxiety surrounds the retiring baby boom generation in corporate America today. Many thriving businesses began in the post World War II manufacturing boom. As those knowledge workers leave for the sunny golf courses of Florida, they take with them lifetimes of knowledge and skills that some businesses will never replace.  But it doesn’t have to be that way for your organization.

Join us for the workshop on December 16. Click here to register.

Our host for the event, AmpTech, serves as a provider of expertise for innovators, entrepreneurs and startups.

AmpTech Commercialization Center

As part of the Greater Philadelphia Entrepreneurship and Innovation Ecosystem, AmpTech maintains a collaborative environment where start-ups, service providers, investors, academia and local businesses can join together to get products and services to market FASTER. AmpTech bridges the gap for start-ups and corporate innovators by providing a place to develop products quickly and under one roof. AmpTech provides rapid prototyping capabilities establishing an opportunity to pilot various technologies before market launch.

31 General Warren Blvd, Malvern, PA 19355, USA
info@amptech.org   |   484-320-8938
http://amptech.org/

For more information about AmpTech, click here.

If you have questions, you can also contact me directly at workingwithsmes@gmail.com.

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Available Now! Finding Your SMEs: Capturing Knowledge from Your Retiring Subject Matter Experts Before They Leave

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Pre-Publication copies of Finding Your SMEs are available today for $17.99. Click here to order.

If you’re like many companies, much of your expertise is getting ready to retire. Finding Your SMEs: Capturing the Knowledge of Your Retiring Subject Matter Experts Before They Leave gives you a methodology for working with your internal subject matter experts.
Make sure you are:

– capturing your most critical knowledge

– talking to the right people

– doing an environmental scan that considers your past and your future

You consider your company a forward-looking learning organization. You want to get knowledge management down to a science.

So you are you wondering…

What happens when the mass exodus of Baby Boomers leaves and takes their expertise with them?

Have we replaced our retiring workers?

Can we replace our experts?

What will happen to our core business if we don’t replace them?

How can we prepare younger workers to learn what our legacy employees know?

If you have asked yourself these questions, this book is for you.

Finding Your SMEs: Capturing Knowledge from Your Subject Matter Experts in Your Organization Before They Leave gives you a way to analyze your company and its value to your customers so you can identify your most critical assets that you must preserve for business continuity.

You will also learn:

·         where to find the places your experts reside in your company

·         which assets are worth spending your finite resources to capture

·         how to determine if you are capturing expertise correctly

·         what to consider when you project your future knowledge needs

·         why you need to consider technology options for preservation methods and training platforms for transferring knowledge from your experts to future generations
Pre-publication copies available today for $17.99. Click here.

For those who are local in the Philadelphia area, I will be holding a half-day public workshop on 3 Strategies for Finding, Capturing and Transferring Your Internal Expertise to help you successfully manage your internal knowledge to make it available for next gen learners. Please email me at workingwithsmes@gmail.com for details.

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Checklist for Finding and Working with Subject Matter Experts

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10 Steps to Capturing Critical Information from Retiring Workers

This week, I will be speaking to a local manufacturers’ association on an overview about how to identify and capture knowledge from the mass exodus of retiring workers.

It forced me to break down the entire methodology of two books into a few slides. After coming up with 10 steps, I thought I’d share the 30,000 foot view with my blog viewers, as well. As those of you who have been following this blog for a year or more already know, the devil is in the details. However, the high level view is a very good place to start so the devil has context.

The 10 steps have three major divisions. They are:

Part 1: Identify Critical Areas of Information within Your Organizationt

1. Make a thorough assessment of your organizational chart

2. Don’t overlook the obvious

3. Don’t overlook the un-obvious

Part 2: Ask Them the Right Questions

4. People don’t know what they don’t know

5. Do a well-thought-out interview

6. Get them talking

Part 3: Assess Your Current Information Assets

7. Review current knowledge and training materials

8.Update material where possible, fill in gaps where necessary

9. Consider all information assets and connect them with trends in your company and your industry

10. Iterate regularly

Currently scheduled public workshop: I will be conducting a workshop on how to work with subject matter experts at the 2nd Annual AGXPE meeting in Annapolis, MD from September 25-28, 2016. AGXPE is an organization dedicated to best practices in the pharmaceutical and related regulated industries. For more information or to register, click here.

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In Favor of a CLO? When NextGen Learning Needs a View from the Top

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When organizations do knowledge management well, it is usually because territorial battles waged. Someone with authority at the top made decisions and roles of responsibility in the training department realigned. That is why it is critical for organizations to have a chief learning officer sitting in the C-suite. Territorial battles need referees who have the big picture and no entrenched interests in preserving an individual fiefdom in the kingdom that is your corporation.

Knowing which knowledge to capture, retain or discard requires trainers to be part of the inner circle of business leaders in an organization. It becomes the role of the training expert to also understand business in general as well as their organizations and industries specifically so they can be at the helm with other executives to assist them in making these decisions. We are beginning to see Chief Learning Officers (CLO) alongside the CEO, CFO, CIO and, in medical organizations, CMO. As we think about successful businesses as learning organizations, it follows logically that the training department is an essential member of the team that determines the direction of the organization.

This critical role at the big kids’ table requires trainers to learn the business of business, as well as the industry in which they work. Without industry knowledge, programs lack context and this contributes to the fact that training programs often wind up as shelfware, never used or cast aside after a brief time. If the instructional designer has little knowledge of the business or industry in which they work, how can their programs have context or relevance to the enterprise? The answer, of course, is that they can’t.

The subject of knowledge management is now as much part of an organization’s success strategy as its sales, R&D and marketing strategies.

Here are 5 steps to guide your organization’s critical knowledge capture requiring a champion in the C-suite

1. Funnel all training and knowledge management through one pathway in the organization that ends at the top

2. Identify the expertise you need to capture by doing a matrix walk-through

3. Create a plan for working with your critical subject matter experts and conduct interviews that result in capturing critical information for your training programs

4. Develop a logical single system for storing and retrieving critical knowledge

5. Establish a review process to assess the ongoing relevancy and accuracy of critical knowledge stored in your organization

The final arbiter of the value of existing knowledge and its relevance going forward must be someone who has the widest possible vantage point in the organization. That person needs to have as few attachments to the way things are done as possible because it is their job to envision the way things need to be. CLOs,  or someone in a similar high-level, above-the-fray capacity, needs to be able to make the tough calls regarding which training is most effective and which consultants are adding value.

Does your training department have a strong voice in the executive suite?

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Join Us 4/18 at 7 pm for a Free Working With SMEs Webinar

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Do you want to talk about Subject Matter Experts? Then join us on Monday, April 18 at 7 p.m. for a free webinar on finding and working with subject matter experts in your organization.

The Eastern Pennsylvania Chapter of the Association for Talent Development (ATDEPA) is sponsoring this free, one-hour webinar where we can talk SMEs- why to find them, how to find them, and what to do when you’ve found them. You don’t have to be a member of ATD or our chapter to attend, although we’d love to have you as a member.

Our chapter wants to thank DeSales University for hosting this online event as we take their new Blackboard software for a ride. We played with it yesterday and the technology is a go. It’s got some cool functionality so you can pop in on your microphone, join us by video or call in from your phone.

Our host from DeSales University in Center Valley, PA is Eric J. Hagan, Ed.D., Director, Distance Education and Instructional Technology, who will be driving the webinar and also bringing academia’s perspective to the topic.

So if you’ve got an hour to spare from anywhere to talk SMEs and want to engage in some conversation, please join us by clicking on this link. It will take you  to the Eastern PA ATD website where you can sign up. You’ll receive verification of your registration from the chapter.

Here’s that link again. I hope to see you there.

Been On SME Blog Hiatus!

Yes, it’s true. I’ve been on a Working With SMEs blog hiatus. I started a second book, Finding Your SMEs, and it is chugging along more slowly than I had anticipated. So I am carving out time to attack it and finish it.

Finding Your SMEs is more than half finished, and has been for nearly a year. The webinar will cover some of the new material from the book and the live workshop under development.

One more time, here’s that link to our ATD Eastern PA chapter website where you can register to attend. We plan to record it and make it available later, so if you sign up and can’t make it, you’ll get the replay.