This entry was posted on Thursday, August 14th, 2008 at 12:19 pm by Dawn and is filed under Industry talk, Reusability 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
If more than one person is involved in a project, politics happens. It’s inevitable. But for all that calling something ‘political’ is supposed to be derogatory, there’s no need to dread it.
Bryan Chapman addressed this issue in a webinar discussion on reusability 2.0, where the topic centered around the getting learning content management and enterprise content management working together. One of the audience members wanted ideas on how to handle the political aspects of unifying people, processes and systems to get everyone working together. From Chapman’s response:
… The idea is to get people involved. What you really need to do is open a dialogue.I’ll talk about one software client I’m working with, where the driving force was that their documentation group, the people who were creating help for the system, and the training department, all suddenly realized that they were writing slightly different versions of the software procedures. Sometimes they were conflicting. It was driven by a business issue, to say, ‘Why do we have the help folks, who are roughly basing it on the same material, and then we’re taking it and readapting it for learning?’ They started working together.
So the steps are really easy. First, form a content strategy taskforce. If you’ve got those standard operating procedures and you know who owns them, get them involved. Learning people usually go into this conversation with a ‘gimme, gimme’ attitude. They say, ‘What have you got that we can use?’ And I would say that in order to be really successful in selling this idea to your organization, you need the opposite attitude. You need to say, ‘What can training do for you guys? Because we’ve got a lot of great material, and we’re trying to get it out not only through our training channels, but so that others can utilize it and make it work.’
I won’t read through each step, but next, finding out what information you have. A lot of the content is not going to be useful to learning, so let’s not worry about that; instead of creating a technical infrastructure where everything can be shared, really look for where those synergies occur. …
Politics can be about unpleasant things that I don’t need to torment you with listing. But it can also be about solving problems, making lives easier, scratching backs and gathering goodwill. And, perhaps most importantly in this case, not having to reproduce efforts across different departments.
Janet Clarey recently wrote about the self-service revolution, where everybody gets to ’save time’ by doing for ourselves things that other people used to get paid to do. She gave examples like pumping our own gas and checking out our grocery purchases. As service declines, time crunch increases, while at the same time the overall family burden of work hours has been going up.
Blending enterprise and learning content management can take some extra time upfront, and Chapman did discuss the small, initial learning curve that comes with getting used to XML content storage interfaces. Getting past this concern, where overburdened people would prefer not to change the things they’ve already gotten used to and put in the time to learn, can be a challenge in the negotiations.
However, in the end, it reduces workload for individuals and across the organization. It means that you only have to write something once, and if you want to change it, you only have to go to one place. You don’t have to track down a coworker to find the latest version, you don’t have to worry that you’ve missed updating a crucial distribution channel.
Less time, less worry. Now that’s a positive campaign platform you can run on in good conscience.
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