This post is one in a series that answers questions from viewers of the January 28 KnowledgeVision Google Hangout where we talked about the challenges of working with SMEs.

Question/Comment from Dale: Thank you Peggy for the useful tips on dealing with SMEs. Lots of good stuff here! In your section on the Not Quite Expert SME you recommend to loop in other knowledgeable people, but you don’t spend any time talking about the best way to do that. In my experience, I would never go behind the SME’s back. I would ask the SME who I am working with if there is anyone else they would want to weigh in on this content. I am concerned that inexperienced designers would act independently and undermine trust. On the review front, I would ask the SME who they would recommend to proof the content. And, we ALWAYS do dry runs before any content is put out. 

Thank you for this great question, Dale, Without trying to be too self-serving, I cover this in the book Working With SMEs but we couldn’t cover everything in the pre-learning section of the webinar.

If you find that you have a SME that isn’t an expert, you really need to first try to address it with the person themselves if that is possible. Sometimes, if you are lucky, the assigned SME will tell you upfront they aren’t the right person which gives you both a good place to start finding the right person. You are right, you never want to go behind anybody’s back and undercut their trust. These can be very sensitive political situations, too, depending who your SME is, right? So, yes, your instinct to tread carefully is a really good one.

One of the things someone mentioned to me when they were reading a first draft of the book is that sometimes you will get a SME who doesn’t want the task so they’ll tell you they don’t know or they aren’t the right person just to get off the hook. I don’t know how you sort that out if you aren’t on the inside of the department and have a good handle on that. But it is worth mentioning to make sure that if they say they aren’t the right person, that you believe them and then enlist their help to find the right person.

However, if you have a SME and you aren’t getting what you need, and they don’t want to admit it, you should document that. At some point, if you try to fill in information gaps in your training program and you aren’t getting answers from them, you might go to your manager and tell them the problem and show them your documentation. If you aren’t assigned a SME who really can give you what you need for your training program, something probably went wrong when the project manager asked for SMEs to be assigned. Another issue could be that the SME is really afraid for their job if they think that they cannot give you good content. They may be covering up and you really just have to sort that out.

When you are an outside training firm, identifying the SMEs on the project can be part of the Project Charter or Scope at the outset where it is defined who the client company will assign to work with you. Then you have that document to fall back on, where you can say, look, this is what we need to write this program and it looks like this person can’t help us. When it’s an internal training department, the head of training could be involved in helping you solve the problem.

I agree with you, I think you are right about asking for another SME to put an eye on the program. There should be several layers of signoffs anyway because even though your SME may be the most knowledgeable person in the organization about your topic, the SME is very rarely the person who is writing the checks or has responsibility for the final product. The person who has final authority for the project is the person who has the responsibility to approve your training program in a signoff procedure.