Training Champions and Knowledge Networks

Knowledge Networks, in conjunction with Training Champions, provides a sustainable strategy of skilling staff within the context of the workplace. It uses an integrated series of common and best-practices, specific work practices and some enterprise software for support.
One of the main benefits is to ensure knowledge and expertise of business processes is retained in-house and on-hand so external reliance and associated restrictions to deliver training is minimised. This assists in reducing the impact that changes within the organisation (such as organisational change or staff movement) can place on systems and processes.
Some core tenants underpin the Training Champions and Knowledge Networks:

• “Be Self-Sufficient and Self-Sustaining”
• “Be Responsible and Accountable/expect responsibility and accountability”.
• “Openness, sharing and community”.

The Training Champions aims to achieve the following goals:

• Promotes expertise and knowledge of business processes within the workplace
• Provides a method to quickly train staff and commence their duties.
• Allows ongoing training self-sufficiency within the team.

The Knowledge Networks aims to achieve the following goals:

• Capture tacit or undocumented knowledge and convert to explicit knowledge
• Provide an efficient method to access information to support business processes
• "Closes the loop" by providing a two-way communication pathway between process owners and the leaders of process enablers, useful for efficiencies, improvements and exposing previously unknown limitations.

Knowledge Networks and Training Champions are "two sides of the same coin" with strong and complementary connections between the two strategies.
To achieve this requires the following:

• Cultivate a knowledge sharing culture.
• Identify key knowledge areas and knowledge champions
• Implement mentoring and knowledge building programs
• Ensure departing employees impart crucial knowledge to their successors
• Have tools and processes on hand to capture and store suitable employee knowledge
• Take steps to minimise the risk of knowledge collapse
• Develop networks to sustain ongoing relationships and improve knowledge retention

While many organisations have knowledge management policies that deal with transferring essential knowledge when a key staff member decides to leave, Knowledge Networks and Training Champions deal with sustainable capturing and sharing of that knowledge in an ongoing way.

Workloads, Responsibility and Performance Planning

Central to the implementation of Knowledge Networks and Training Champions is the requirement that the appropriate parties be given suitable areas of responsibilty to adequately perform their duties implementing Knowledge Networks and Training Champions. Quality is then controlled by a performance planning and measuring process.
Further, efforts, duties and workloads are recognised within Performance Planning to ensure the implementation of Knowledge Networks and Training Champions is done in managable and sustainable way.
For more information, see Achievement Planning.

Theory and Background

The pace of new information occurring in the workplace means new ways of working and leading.

• Today’s workforce must know a little about a lot but know where to get more detail when necessary.
• "Unlearning" becomes a skill of the 21st century.
• Today’s workforce is expected to continually refresh, update, and learn new skills to meet job demands.

From: "Developing Talent In The New World Of Business" by Claire Schooley, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research (October 19, 2011)

The Training Champions and Knowledge Networks deals with these points in the following way:

Knowing a Little About a Lot

In teams where team members are moving from task to task, team to team or even role to different role, it is impracticable to expect everyone will be an expert at it all. For Training Champions within a team (that is, non-accredited training champions), different staff members can become team leaders of each process, adopting a "divide and conquer" approach. The formalised structure of TC/KN assists with the "know where to get more detail when necessary"

For end users, they can call upon

• documentation supplied by process owners
• documentation created by their team or other users following "community sharing" principles
• the Local Business Experts as their internal Training Champions

For Team Leaders, support can come from

• the process owners
• Accredited Training Champions (where available)
• Networking with other team leaders (eg: "user reference groups") using the same processes
• their own team in validating and confirming processes (and even supporting documentation) is correct

For Process Owners

• teams using the process, validating and confirming processes when they are applied.
• Team Leaders providing feedback and suggestions, repeated requests for support showing deficiencies needing correction

Additionally, having full featured and easy to use knowledgebases helps with knowing where to get more detail when necessary (part of Knowledge Networks), employing "self-service" and "just-in-time" strategies for efficiencies.

Unlearning

While the popular definition of Unlearning is "Discard (something learned, esp. a bad habit or false or outdated information) from one's memory", in the context of TC/KN, it is simply learning to see things differently or to at least be open to it. This relates to the discovery of efficencies and feeding that back for evaluation as part of a continous improvement cycle. This does NOT mean that not following established processes is acceptable. However, it does mean continually analyising how well the processes fit to achieve the required business outcomes. Care must be taken, however, that - what may seem poorly designed or illogical for end-users may infact be the best possible (or perhaps the only) way available at the time. In those situations, it is highly desirable to be able to adequately explain this to the end-users, usually via the Team Leaders. Unlearning also applies to the adoption of the Training Champions and Knowledge Networks strategy to replace previous practices.

Refresh, Update, and Learn

In creating a flexible and adaptable workforce, as well as building individual capabilities (that may have connections to leadership building strategies and succession planning), it is becoming expected that staff are exposed to more learning opportunities, and refreshing previously aquired skills and knowledge. With Training Champions, it is not just the responsibility of the Team Leader to support this, but an individual responsibility of all staff to pro-actively engage in their own learning for the ongoing benefit of themselves, and of the team. For end-users, this may lead to becoming a mentor, mentors to power users, power users to team leaders, Local Business Expert (LBE) of one process to LBE of other processes.