I wish to share with you an important insight I learned. Beforehand, let me tell you how it all started…
A few months ago, I arrived at a nice small company which uses MS Office 365. The package includes the option to set up a staff room (of course, using SharePoint) on a cloud.
The company CEO found managing documents and sharing knowledge and information very important. He too, knows that knowledge is vital for success. Since we are talking of a small company (no more than 10 workers) with limited resources, both financial and human, we decided to set up a professional staff room that will serve as the company portal and the main place in which the shared knowledge will be managed; this, with minimum resources invested, by merging the stages of the process.
So, how do you perform such a task in a small company where resources are scarce?
The analysis stage was reduced to 3 meetings. During these meetings I interviewed the CEO and occasionally a worker joined. Out of concern for conserving resources we decided not to hand in a written analysis. During the interviews, I wrote down the needs and objectives and formulated a general idea of the nature of the staff room.
Through another meeting, I presented the CEO with the idea I formulated while presenting the navigation tree and content that should appear in it. After receiving an initial green light I began to build the staff room. I constructed a sample page which included the navigational frame (upper and side) and presented the homepage to the CEO, and also presented a sample theme page and a few other page templates of different sorts. At this point, the design and structure were approved and I continued to build the rest of the pages and templates. In the final meeting I implemented the process and instructed the workers. I presented the staff room and explained how to continue from here: how to manage the documents, how to upload messages and share knowledge etc.
And this is my insight: I understood that every company, as small as it might be, can and should establish a successful platform for professional Knowledge Management and intra-organizational communication. I also found out that this is possible for minimal investment.
Personally, I enjoyed being part of a project that began and ended in a short period of time with impressive results that answered all needs.
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