Something to consider: using intranets as Knowledge Management tool to support collaborative pre-writing planning

Jakob Nielsen is a name some of you may recognize. He is a self-appointed guru on all matters regarding usability of web sites and web-mediated work tools. You can find much of his work summarized on his web site titled Useit.

Last week Nielsen came out with his list of Top 10 designed business Intranets for 2011. Here's the link.

I noted with interest Nielsen's comment "If there's anything that has been overused, abused, and hyped beyond the level of cliché, it's "knowledge management." Thus, it might be better to say that many of this year's winners were strong in "managing knowledge" on their intranets." 

Managing knowledge. This is a concept where I see drug and medical device teams struggle all the time. One reason for the struggle is the slow uptake of tools that can help foster an effective work environment and change deeply ingrained cultural practices.

I believe intranets, such as WIKIs are great tools that should be deployed at the project team level. These platforms become incredibly valuable from the moment a clinical development plan is written until well after a dossier is submitted to the regulatory authorities. 

While it is true that knowledge management is not a technology issue, effort must still be spent in providing a suitable environment to facilitate knowledge capture and sharing. 

I am suggesting the use of team specific intranets as a way to promote cultural change in an organization, at the level of knowledge-sharing activities and also for shaping broader work behaviors. In most companies where I train or consult, little has really changed since the 1960s in how people approach the planning and authoring of documents.  Using intranets, like a WIKI, can quickly get a team applying best practices in terms of pre-writing planning.

Make workplace training effective

I’ve been facilitating quite a few workshops lately related to the concept of strategic review. At each session I’ve had numerous people comment to me that they found the workshop to be amongst the best training experiences of their professional lives. One person commented, “too bad the rest of the training I experience cannot be as practical and applicable to my work world.” I’ve heard comments like this time and again over the years. It is unfortunate that so much money and time is invested in “training” to yield little to nothing in terms of outcomes. An outcome that is readily avoidable when you design training using assumptions about how adults learn.

Research shows that adults in the workplace setting learn best in interactive, problem-based, applied situations that incorporate learning through simulations, case studies, and participant presentations. Adult learners need to see that the professional development learning and their day-to-day activities are related and relevant. New skills and concepts must demonstrate practical value and allow people to alter established work practices. In our training sessions we also center discussions on client documents, workplace situations, and real-life case studies. Adults want to be the origin of their own learning and will resist learning activities they believe are an attack on their competence. Thus, professional development needs to give participants some control over the what, who, how, why, when, and where of their learning.


Originally published on our Knowledge Management blog

The McCulley/Cuppan Standards Development Process We Use with Our Clients

As I mentioned in a previous post, in our McCulley/Cuppan consulting work we find the prevalent standards used to determine the “success” of a document are largely driven by simple measures of accuracy and then a passel of “home brewed” concepts for characteristics of document that are largely idiosyncratic ideas about what matters to the reader.

When you have 10 people reviewing a document you will end up with at least 12 opinions about the quality of the document (incongruous number is intentional as sometimes you have a reviewer offering more than one opinion that often conflict) and ways of describing quality that are all over the map. People use different terms to describe quality and if they actually use the same term, then it is highly unlikely that they will use the same definition for the term. So the first problem faced in the review process is the vocabulary used to describe quality attributes in a document.

When writers and reviewers compose or edit text, they continually make decisions that concern semantics—the meaning their words convey—and syntax—the way the words are arranged and other structural elements of the document. However, writers and reviewers often base these decisions on assumptions that have not been tested with technically-oriented adult readers or complex, data-rich, technical documents. Worse yet is many assumptions have never been tested to determine validity. Thus, there are actions ordered by writers and reviewers that may not in fact have the expected effects on a readers' performance (we know this is certainly true with one very important reading audience for pharmaceutical and medical device companies—the regulatory agency, like FDA). So the second problem faced in the review process is to understand what document elements have a meaningful impact on semantics and where to focus time and attention on the syntactical elements of a document.

The first thing we do with a client is an examination of the terms used formally (such as in guidance documents) and informally (such as review comments in documents) to describe quality. This will give us a sense of how the organization views quality and how sophisticated they may be in trying to create a common platform that describes document quality for the organization.

The second thing we do is to provide clients with the terms McCulley/Cuppan uses to describe document quality and why the concepts underlying these terms are extremely important to help determine document communication quality. A very important consideration is that the terms should speak the user’s language, with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms.

We spend a huge amount of time talking about semantics. The term "semantics" refers to the study of how language conveys meaning. Using a broad definition of semantics, we help our clients learn how to focus on different features of a document. Features like word choice, the position of information in document sections, paragraphs and in documents as a whole, idea importance, and the visual representation of data.

Then we work with a client team to create and vet working definitions for the various quality standards.

We then roll out the standards in a workshop setting and show people how the standards are applied to the types of documents they have and will produce.


Originally published on our Knowledge Management blog