New SLA Course: Change and Managing Change
Guy St. Clair
Training Partners Special Libraries Association (SLA) and St. Clair Management Resources (SMR) re-introduce the popular Click U Knowledge Management/ Knowledge Services (KM/KS) Premium Program at SLA’s Annual Conference in Chicago in July.
The newly revised series begins with KMKS 105: Change Management and Change Implementation in the Knowledge Domain, offered on Friday, July 13, just prior to the SLA Conference. SMR Senior Consultant Dale R. Stanley teaches the course, joined by SMR President Guy St. Clair.
KMKS 105 is an introduction to “Change” and to tools for helping you successfully implement any new initiative in your organization.
Why “Change”? And why try to “manage change”? Stanley notes that in a recent survey, some 60% of major implementations fail to meet all of their expressed objectives. “…and of those failures, 80% fail because of change management problems.”
Furthermore, the need for us, our organizations, and our planning is no better expressed than by our SLA 2012 Conference theme, “The Future is Now!” There is no better time or opportunity for specialist librarians and other strategic knowledge professionals to lead and be prepared to lead…
So get ready for Change!
The goal of this course is to provide students with concepts and tools that are valuable to any library or knowledge professional who wants to make a difference, to lead, or to help increase the odds of success.
Foundational Principles: KMKS 105 concentrates on change management as a critical skill. Topics included are the five most important attributes of change management and how ignoring them will lead to a project’s failure. The course will also present the knowledge services strategy as a framework for examples of how change management can be applied in your organization.
“The course is designed to provide change management principles that support the development and implementation of any knowledge sharing system,” Stanley says. “These always involve people and change, so it makes good sense to give attention to working with this ‘human side’ of implementation.”
Action-Oriented Instruction: In the course, students will also develop a plan for designing and implementing a change management plan for their next project. With guidance from the instructors, the plan will improve chances of success, raise one’s own visibility, and avoid the all-too-common pitfalls of poor user-adoption.
Learn more about KMKS 105 here.
Stanley and St. Clair also team up for the next day’s KMKS course, KMKS 101: Fundamentals of Knowledge Management and Knowledge Services. The remaining courses in the six-part Knowledge Management/Knowledge Services (KM/KS) Premium Program are offered online:
(2012) August 13, 20, 22, 27, 29: KMKS 102 The Knowledge Audit: Evaluating Intellectual Capital Use, with Robin Jourdan from Ford Motor Company team-teaching with Dale Stanley
(2012) October 15, 22, 24, 29, 31: KMKS 103 Knowledge Strategy: Developing the Enterprise-Wide Knowledge Culture, with St. Clair team-teaching with Stanley
(2013) February 11, 19, 20, 25, 27: KMKS 104 Networking and Social Media: Technology Enabled Knowledge Sharing, with Scott Brown of Social Information Group team teaching with Stanley
(2013) April 8, 15, 17, 22, 24: KMKS 106 Critical Success Factors: Measuring Knowledge Services, with Jourdan team-teaching with Stanley
Learn more about the six-part, year-long Knowledge Management/Knowledge Services (KMKS) Premium Program here.
- May 31, 2012
Scott Quick, at SLA’s Knowledge Management Division’s LinkedIn Group, answers the question “Change Management – is it the foundation of KM?” with the following:
It is indeed. In discussing a major rollout with a pharma client, the library services manager asked a very simple question, but with far reaching implications: how will this new KM solution change the workflow of our researchers. At the heart of this question is change management. Even when simplifying business processes, change management becomes a critical success factor in transiting between current and future states.
Guy St. Clair responds:
Thanks, Scott, for that cogent and practical comment. I think that is exactly the point Dale is making every time he teaches about change management, that it is a critical element in decision making in all workplace decisions. Your comment makes it clear that anyone working in research, information or knowledge management, strategic learning, or any of the other practices where KD/KS is performed on a regular basis, that person is able to work better if he or she understands change management principles.
At the LinkedIn KM/Knowledge Services Group, Douglas Weidner writes:
Guy,
Pretty impressive survey result: Stanley notes that in a recent survey, some 60% of major implementations fail to meet all of their expressed objectives. “…and of those failures, 80% fail because of change management problems.”
In Certification programs at KM Institute we invest much time mastering change management, but I never had that compelling statistic. Intuitively I might have guessed it, but its good to see better evidence than intuition or anecdotal experience.
Do you know the actual survey?
Guy responds: Here’s what Dale Stanley says:
I attribute it to the IMA (Implementation Management Associates http://www.imaworldwide.com) and I should have made this citation. I don’t know if the study was ever published.
Deb Hunt at the LinkedIn SLA Knowledge Management Group wrote:
It IS all about change. No matter the technologies or other systems we recommend and implement, it all comes down to a culture and work change. Often, this is the most challenging part of a KM project.
Guy St. Clair responds:
And why is it so challenging, do you think? We’ve sort of come to believe that people instinctively don’t “like” change, but I’ve often wondered if it’s not so much a question of “like” as of “fear.” When someone doesn’t (or can’t) imagine what the next stage is going to be like – even if it is being put forward as “a change for the good,” isn’t it just human nature to think, “Naw – I won’t go there”? We become a little afraid about moving into unknown territory.
OK. Enough pop psychology, but we might want to think about how we can go about getting people (our knowledge workers, for those of us who work as knowledge strategists) to look forward to the benefits of the change and not focus on the fear that comes from not knowing what’s coming next….
Deb Hunt at the LinkedIn SLA Knowledge Management Division Group wrote:
For the most part, I find that people want to change, but they feel it is yet another thing for them to do. When I remind them of how it used to be and how much easier it will be for them with the new system/software/etc. they begin to get it. I’ve learned that a few internal champions who use the system and are sold on it, become the best cheerleaders to get others using it too. Then usage spreads. Change needs to come from the top down and the bottom up.
Posted by Scott Quick at SLA’s Knowledge Management Division LinkedIn Group:
Have to agree with Deb on a couple of levels. Referring to yet another global pharma client: solution demonstrated a 50% times savings in one daily task alone – verified by a senior information professional working with the tool… yet colleagues of his remain buried in their day-today work, unable to invest the time required to train-up on the new solution, making change difficult at best. Deb’s point of internal champions is a “must have” but so to is the notion of top-down sponsorship, which provides the oxygen for the change (adoption). It this example, executive sponsorship is necessary to provide each information professional the bandwidth they need to balance their day-to-day deliverables with the necessary time to on the solution.
Posted by Deb Hunt at the SLA KM Division LinkedIn Group:
Scott, thanks for pointing out that top management buy-in is essential to adoption so that training and change can actually take place with time given to do so. Sometimes, though, they do give it lip service and expect day-to-day operations to continue with the added workload (at first) or learning and implementing the new tool or solution.
Posted by Christian Gray at the LinkedIn Group SLA Knowledge Management Division:
This is a very interesting discussion and area of opportunity for info pros, it literally kept me from leaving the group this morning. I help organize a talk about Enterprise Social Software for ITIMG earlier this year and one of the panelist was from http://www.antseyeview.com/ these folks are making it happen in a serious way. Becoming a change agent isn’t easy and it isn’t for everyone, but for those that take the risk and win the war, there are rewards: individually and at the organization level.
Guy St. Clair responds:
Thank you, Christian, for your very thoughtful comment.
And I’m so happy that you are helping us focus on the rewards. This is definitely an approach that Dale and I are taking with the SLA KMKS Premium Program (and, not coincidentally, of course) with my students in the M.S. in Information and Knowledge Management program at Columbia University. The only way for change management to succeed is for everyone participating in the change to have a clear understanding of how the change is going to affect the entire organization, both for us as change strategists, for the knowledge workers with whom we work, and for the enterprise as a whole.
Perhaps it’s a matter of perspective? For all involved?