APQC recently talked to Adil Ahmed, Director, Information Architecture and Knowledge Systems at the Bristow Group, about the KM program the Bristow Group launched in 2012 to improve team collaboration, expertise location, content management, and employee engagement.

Adil will be leading a breakout session Taking Flight: Evolution of Knowledge Systems at Bristow Group during the 2015 APQC Knowledge Management Conference April 30 —May 1.

APQC: When building tools and processes for team collaboration, what is the most important thing to do first?

Adil: There are several dimensions to how people work together and collaborate. Company culture, geography, industry practices, team dynamics, and individual demographic factors contribute to how people collaborate. It is important to first understand context: what business outcomes necessitate knowledge sharing, how do individual employees benefit from collaboration, what processes are already in place, and are they perceived to be working well? For example, within the aviation industry it takes pilots, ground crew, and engineers working closely together to fly safely and without unplanned downtime – something we built upon as we developed collaboration services.

APQC: What makes a virtual collaboration tool engaging, and how do you get people to start using a new one?

Adil: Our approach to this can be summarized in one word: simplicity. Simplicity applies at many levels to tools and processes. Starting with the user experience, simplicity goes a long way to enable adoption and engagement. For instance, cluttered menus and multi-layered navigation are an immediate turnoff for employees who are accustomed to using elegant consumer technology. Having to switch context unnecessarily for routine tasks is another way to disengage users – enabling features in the flow is always better. User engagement cannot be an afterthought; it has to be baked into the design, implementation, and support processes from the start.

APQC: Bristow Group has rolled out a range of KM tools over the past two years. What was your implementation plan, and did you do anything to prevent people from getting overwhelmed?

Adil: Designing tools that align with the technical proficiency of your audience is a good place to start. Our approach was somewhat organic. We started with a general sense of how knowledge management practices and tools could add value and tackled the quick wins first: basic file sharing, team collaboration, and project management. We designed services with simple features and expected that over time, we would introduce advanced features based on user feedback. However, employee engagement is key: We identified our super users who helped us evolve our services over time. These employees also champion the use of our services in their organizations.

APQC: Tell us about your content management tools, what makes them work, and how they fit into your broader KM infrastructure.

Adil: Our knowledge management infrastructure is really composed of services. For example, the Bristow Portal is comprised of Sites, Newsroom, Search Center, MySite, and Content Hub services, each designed to meet specific business needs. The Content Hub—a set of SharePoint libraries and lists managed by our enterprise content management (ECM) team—serves as the key repository for managed content. We developed a very simple information architecture to organize and manage enterprise content using flat taxonomies, with heavy use keywords, folksonomies, and search. We spent significant effort in simplifying the content intake and publishing processes. For example, we went from 300+ authors in our legacy intranet to just 12 in the new ECM virtual team. This team is essential, as it defines and enforces standards for content management.

APQC: How do you know if your KM tools—for collaboration, expertise location, content management, and so on—are working? If engagement starts to drop, what are some ways to fix it?

Adil: As part of the design of our KM services, we define metrics to measure usage, performance, quality, and customer satisfaction. These metrics are tracked on a monthly basis, which gives us insight into how well things are working and where we need to improve or adjust. We also rely on our global ECM team and a network of super users to sense gaps in user awareness or education. To keep user engagement strong, we release new features of¾usually once a month. Easy-to-read release notes are published with each release. With every significant release we also augment release notes with ad-hoc webinars and quick guides to enable adoption of new features.