Stumbling, falling, getting back up

The Tribal Knowledge project.
Oh yeah.

Late last year I was given the charge to manage a project to document troubleshooting processes that exist only in the minds of a handful of tech support gurus. It will help the support group to train new support people more effectively, and it will take the pressure off the gurus, who currently spend a lot of time solving the same problems over and over.

We put the project aside at the start of the year, because things were getting busy. After the really busy period, we met in February and agreed to cut down the scope of the pilot phase. People were still too busy to meet regularly to create the half-dozen flowcharts we envisioned as the pilot phase of the project; a lot had been postponed during the big thrash in January. We would do just three flowcharts. We met again a couple weeks later and cut the pilot phase to the smallest possible effort: a single troubleshooting flowchart, to be shared and evaluated, tweaked and published on the BlobCo collaboration site. I could almost hear an imaginary sportscaster exclaim, "Oh, that was a nasty stumble - let's see if they can recover."

A very skilled tech support person volunteered to build the flowchart, and emailed it out for comments a few days later. Someone provided constructive technical review comments. The flowchart owner got very busy and didn't have time to make the changes. I urged her to post it in its unfinished form and let others collaborate on completing it.

Nothing happened.
Imaginary sportscaster: "And we've got a player down on the field - it looked like she was going to recover from that stumble, but she's down."
What went wrong?

The concepts of working laterally, collaborating, and doing stuff because it's the next step in the plan instead of because the boss said "Do it" are central to this project. They're also markers of a mind-set that was once strongly discouraged at BlobCo. I could see from early on that the organization was recovering from a nasty bout of 1980s-style command-and-control, but I didn't realize how deeply it had scarred people. Everybody is too busy with their regular work to participate in this subversive, risky project, because "too busy" is the perfect reason — it's true, and it shows that people's priorities are right: We can't do this strictly internal project because we've got customers who need our help.
Because it takes us a long time to help each customer.
Because we've never documented and shared our troubleshooting knowledge, so we have to go ask somebody instead of looking up a troubleshooting flowchart in some central place.

We are like lumberjacks too busy cutting down trees to stop and sharpen our axes.

I asked the VP sponsoring the project to help me figure out how to get it back on track. He proposed a way: Authority would be exercised. People would be given assignments. There would be rewards at the end.
This didn't feel right.

Six of the couple dozen participants showed up at the next meeting. Several people had mysteriously taken the day off. I was frustrated. But the passive resistance and my frustration both validated my sense that we were taking the wrong approach. My sponsor bowed out and told me I needed to enlist a new project sponsor, suggesting two people who were well-placed to do this.

Time to seek out a Jedi master. I talked to Cat Herder.

"You've got too many people on this project. You need to drop the ones who aren't passionate about it," said Cat Herder, who went on to give advice that resonated strongly with my original sense that the project can only succeed if people WANT to participate. In just a few minutes, I heard several ideas about how to foster the creative, collaborative environment that will set people up for success; and we roughed out a plan for reshaping the Tribal Knowledge project and getting it moving again.
I am listening.

You have to fall down before you understand what it means to get up, and it helps if someone offers you a steadying hand.

I may have just connected with the next great teacher in my life.

The Tribal Knowledge Project: Facing Reality

A couple dozen of us at BlobCo have started a project to collect and share the deep, secret knowledge of the gurus on our technical staff - those amazing people who can get to the bottom of any customer's problem, no matter how intermittent or bizarre. They know things the rest of us don't, and we'd all be more valuable to our customers if we could learn what they know.

I've been given the extraordinary privilege of coordinating this effort. I don't think of it as leading, because all I'm doing is facilitating the process of deciding what to do and how to do it. Later I'll organize the information that comes out of the project. These are things I do anyway, as part of my job, so it doesn't feel like I'm doing any leading. Maybe steering a little, since I have deep, secret knowledge of how to collect and present information; but it's the folks in the front of the canoe who will keep us from smashing up on the rocks in the places where the water flows fast.

We have about one big mental breakthrough a week. I don't know about you, but that's enough to keep me really excited about the project. At our last meeting, the big idea was to work in teams of two or three to work out the process for solving each of the problems on our list.

But things are getting busy at BlobCo. We have a product release coming up. On top of that, everyone who's not involved in that is getting ready for a big conference. And this project hadn't even been imagined when people figured their headcount requirements for the year.

One of the technical services people came to me quite upset that she wasn't going to have time for the project for a while. Time to deal with reality. Since it's crucial for me to keep the project from becoming a burden, I let everyone know we were calling a halt to work on the project until after the conference and product release. When I updated the VP of Mumble on our progress, I explained this decision, and he agreed - he needs his people to focus on the company's current priorities.

The Tribal Knowledge Project will go live again next month. I'm looking forward to continuing our adventures.