2 March 2015 | JW Marriott | Hong Kongilta.personifycloud.com/webfiles/productfiles/3297208/B1... · 2015. 3. 3. · 2 March 2015 | JW Marriott | Hong Kong. If you build it, will

2 March 2015 | JW Marriott | Hong Kong

If you build it, will they come?

Delivering effective KM projects

Stephanie Abbott

Principal, Kitsune Consulting

You’ve found yourself in a complex

ecosystem….

Law firm environments – culture and

complexity

Compare to a corporation:

• Lawyer personality traits strongly influence

organizational culture.

• Ownership and management structure different:

• Impact on leadership and decision making

• Highly invested owners present

• Position of shared/support services

Add globalization, mergers, lateral recruitment….

Market and technological pressure

• Accelerating pace of technology diffusion and disruption – need

to adapt to rapid systems change

• Need to respond to client expectations re value, speed,

innovation and security

• Intensifying competition changing firm structures, business

models

• New entrants with a heightened focus on talent

• Pursuit of optimal firm scale

• Impact of consumerization, commoditization, automation

• Opportunities and challenges posed by emerging economies

• Pursuit of differentiation in the face of continuing change

(From ILTA’s Legal Technology Future Horizons Report, published 2014)

Legal KM – typical scope

Client knowledge

Current awareness/research

tools

Financial/matter knowledge

Expertise

Efficiency/project management

Collaboration

Professional development

Choose focus carefully

Traps for unwary

Strategic projects

Quick wins

Holy grails

Cost

and c

om

ple

xity

Impact on business

high

highlow

Source: Nottingham Law School, KM Master Class

How to?

• Build consensus?

• Integrate diversity and prioritize?

• Handle skeptics?

• Mesh across projects and initiatives?

• Stay focussed enough to deliver on strategy

execution?

Example – new look, feel and functionality

for written work product

What did we do?

• Created a distinctive style for written

documentation that exemplified the firm’s

identity and enabled efficient document

production.

What were the challenges?

• Acceptance and engagement

• Impact on productivity

How did we overcome the challenges?

• Extensive consultation throughout

• Clear sense of purpose and trust among

project team members

• Logged issues and decisions/choices

obsessively

• Chose our champions and our battles

carefully

• Tight process but outcome more important

• Integrated as much as possible – technology,

content, skills.

Example: consolidating to a global

intranet platform

What did we do?

• Integrated established Asia intranet with global

platform

What were the challenges?

• Inconsistent content matrix designs

• Depth of legacy content

• Workflow disruption

• Link to change and identity issues

• Distributed project team (geography and

function).

How did we overcome the challenges?

• Acknowledge past, but look to the future.

• Zeroed in on a defining purpose:

“We’re all on the same page”

• Prioritised core team relationships and co-ordination

• Knew exactly why we’d done things as we had

Lessons?

• Understand the value in context

• Listen hard, then make a choice

• Work really hard on cross-functional

relationships – collaboration, co-ordination and

trust

• Stay focussed

• Seek top level support but take responsibility

for detail

• Make clear choices and track decisions

• Respond to change but stick to the point

Why strategy execution unravels

New research:

• Lack of co-ordination and collaboration

across business units

• Lack of organizational agility

• Lack of deep understanding of strategy and

connections between priorities

• Performance measures do not recognize

behavior that supports the above

• Relying only on top management to drive

executionSee “Why strategy execution unravels – and what to do about it”, Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes

and Charles Sull, HBR March 2015

Critical success factors - organisational

• Leadership supporting and empowering

teams to work together.

• Ability to really draw together cross-functional

teams.

• Clear and strong link to strategy – well

understood and co-ordinated.

• Sophisticated (but not necessary elaborate)

planning – built-in agility.

• Culture that enables fluid resource allocation.

• Good process integrity but outcomes are the

priority.

Beware complacency!

(See A Sense of Urgency, John P Kotter, Harvard Business Press, 2008)

Beware false urgency!

KM leader’s project checklist

• Listen hard (and skeptically)

• Know exactly how your project fits in

• Be a good collaborator

• Call out complacency and resist false urgency

• Do your homework

• Make clear choices, track them and back them

• Prototype, test, refine

• Evaluate, measure, reflect