Integrating Content into Processes

Ensuring employees have everything they need to complete a project is a critical factor for project execution. In a recent interview, Bob Hiebeler, co-founder of St. Charles Consulting Group, shared insights into how leading organizations integrate knowledge content into their business processes.

Put Content into the Flow of Work

According to Hiebeler, leading organizations put content in the pathway of the user — making them trip over the information rather than creating siloed repositories. As outlined in APQC’s article Putting Knowledge Where People Will Trip Over It in a Format That Fits the Target Audience, it’s important to deliver information when, where, and how employees need it. To accomplish this goal organizations need to:

• focus on the daily needs of the users and
• think about how to put knowledge in the path — or business process — of the users, which Hiebeler calls “process visibility.”

Most organizations take a different approach to knowledge management (KM): the supply-side approach.

Supply-Side vs. Demand-Side Approaches to Knowledge Management

To explore the difference between supply-side and demand-side approaches to KM in business process, let’s start with an example of where knowledge content and process overlap in a professional services organization: writing a proposal. Imagine a newly hired consultant has been tasked with working on a proposal. Sure the new consultant went through onboarding last month, where he or she received training on the process, templates, and location of information on proposal writing. However, given the sheer volume of information acquired during onboarding the consultant doesn’t know where to start. Rather than asking his or her boss and potentially looking incompetent, what will the new consultant do? More than likely the consultant will rely on the human network and seek aid from a colleague. This approach will result in the desired proposal. However, it is prone to the limitations of a supply-side approach: it reinforces a bias toward tribal knowledge and limits the quality of the proposal to one person’s skill level. In other words, the output of the process will only be as good as the person who showed the consultant how to do it, because it doesn’t take into account the best practices and knowledge of the entire organization.

Figure 1 compares the characteristics of the supply-side and demand-side approaches to knowledge management for business processes.

The supply-side approach is similar to a shopping mall; there are a series of suppliers that promote their wares or put together catalogues of their wares. For example, marketing will put all of its content — branding standards, templates, tips for the sales force, etc. — in its store (a repository within the intranet). Then legal has a second shop that contains all of its products and safety has its own store full of standards, policies, and procedures. The problem with this approach is it puts all responsibility for process compliance on the users. The user has to know what is available in each store and what content to think about at the point it’s needed. Ultimately, this approach relies on extensive communications, training, and tribal knowledge.

Demand-side KM, on the other hand, is similar to a kiosk. Users go to the kiosk, enter what they are “trying to accomplish” and receive an outline of the process, including activities, tasks, steps, a list of necessary tools and content and their locations. Content is organized by process, so users only have to know what they are trying to accomplish and can get a map to guide them. In other words, this approach focuses on who the users are, where they are, and what they are doing. Figure 2 provides an example situation in which the demand-side approach is beneficial.

Demand-Side Approach Example: New Employee Orientation

One thing to take away from the example in Figure 2 is that the demand-side approach requires collaboration among departments and stakeholder engagement to ensure everything is “baked into” the single orientation process.

Stakeholder Involvement

Organizations are steadily moving to more cross-functional work, in which business processes involve the cooperation and input of multiple departments. The demand-side approach supports this change, because it requires organizations to stay aware of who will be affected by any given process. In other words, who are the key stakeholders for the single process? Furthermore, this approach has several intrinsic benefits, it:

• captures the best thinking throughout the organization,
• ensures all stakeholders’ needs are met,
• creates a holistic picture of a process, and
• reduces rework.

When looking at defining a process it’s more difficult to think about what’s not there, rather than what is. This requires organizations to cast a wide net to engage all potential stakeholders. However, where do you draw the line on how many people to involve? Hiebeler notes that leading organizations will typically begin with a small group to create an initial framework around a new process. The team stays aware of who will be affected and pulls in additional stakeholders as the collaboration continues. Figure 3 outlines an example of a collaborative workshop approach to creating a process.

Collaboration Example: Product Recall Process Workshop

It’s vital to keep the question “who else?” at the forefront while developing a process. For a brand new process, Hiebeler suggests including people representing the following core stakeholder goals or objectives:

• Best practices (efficiency and effectiveness)
• Compliance (financial and regulatory)
• Environmental (especially for any manufacturing process)
• Safety (for heavy manufacturing, mining, etc.)
• Customer satisfaction

Organizations will often overlook the customer’s perspective when changing processes. Organizations that make this mistake run the risk of creating a process that will either result in inconvenience for the customer or add no value to the customer.

Another important aspect of stakeholder involvement is creating buy-in for the demand-side approach. This really boils down to two things: (1) a collaborative culture and (2) support from leadership. Here leadership’s responsibility is to promote the approach, broadcast it, and show how it results in better collaboration throughout the organization. Particularly, how it breaks down silos and makes the needs of various groups visible to one another.

Process and Content Framework

Since the demand-side approach requires a framework based on what you are trying to accomplish, the next question is how to create a framework that encompasses the high-level process to more specific processes (from 50,000 feet to ground-level view). The best place to start is a one-page document that outlines the company’s processes as a whole. You then group the processes by purpose and owner, break the processes into stages, and assign the appropriate necessary content and tools with them; this breakdown is illustrated in Figure 4.

Operationalization of Processes

Most organizations are thorough about outlining the tasks and steps of a process. The same cannot be said for detailing the process groups, categories, phases, and activities. However, these three areas tend to be managed at the executive level and provide a framework for understanding who the stakeholders are and how the processes interact. Another way to think about this is the phases and groups act as the glue that holds all of the organization’s processes together.

Figure 5 looks at the breakdown of a process and the key questions that can be used to create a similar map within your organization. For example, the finance department might have approximately ten groups of processes, one of which might be the accounts payable process. The accounts payable process would in turn have 4–5 phases with 4–5 activities for each phase. Each activity would then be further broken down to a series of tasks and steps.

Process Breakdown

This type of detailed mapping provides clarity and visibility into the process and its requirements. Organizations will typically combine this type of process map with workflow tools and/or extensive training to ensure employees trip over content as they need it. Workflow tools like ERP systems can require employees to enter a code to denote that they are complying with different requirements, ensuring process compliance. Training creates awareness of the process and content and relies on supervisors to reinforce the use of process maps. In regards to the proposal example from earlier, using this approach the employee would be able to look up “write a proposal” in the system and get access to the steps and content necessary to complete the task.

It’s important to note that this type of process mapping requires another key component: the ability to differentiate between routine and nonroutine tasks. For example, processing accounts payable would be considered a routine task with a prescribed series of steps and templates. Other tasks that require judgment or creativity, like problem resolution, would be considered nonroutine tasks. Nonroutine tasks rely on content that outlines the organization’s problem solving process and best practices on how similar problems have been resolved.