First steps

Ten years ago we started trying KM tools to drive breakthrough technologies and market leadership.  In 2013-2014, the telecom market had the strongest competition. It was important to be the first to “capture” the market, to be the first who offer the client convenient and new solutions, to keep the client through the provision of service. Success factors were: technology, the company's ability to expand and build a service model.

Barriers that hindered development: a hierarchy that slows down time-to-market, a process model of interaction that implies clear boundaries for each function and communication through the manager, lack of necessary competencies of the team.

The mission of the pilot project was to create a culture of collaboration in one of the company's regional teams. At the start, the team received the basics of KM from Ron Young, the Knowleger virtual assistant, and a business challenge from the leader of the region. For six months, the team, accompanied by special trackers, mastered KM techniques, polished their own rules and principles of interaction, made a business project and worked with other teams from companies from the external market.

The process was not easy. More than half of the team members were replaced because the selection was conducted by the leader without taking into account the motivation of each participant. The team rapidly went through the stages of development and learned how to set goals independently, make decisions, negotiate, and interact on an equal footing, despite the different statuses of positions. Collaboration with external project participants was difficult due to the closeness of the culture.

However, when summing up the results of the pilot, the participants noted that the key results (in addition to the implementation of the business project) were: the emergence of new format leaders, the formation of project teams across the boundaries of the hierarchy, capable of developing and implementing breakthrough ideas for the market. The involvement of branch employees increased by 12% per year.

Success factors:

 1. Selection of the “right” people with the necessary motivation.

 2. Setting up communications in the team, distribution of roles.

 3. Collaboration across boundaries and hierarchies.

 4. Collaboration with external teams to generate business ideas.

 5. Creation of a "sandbox" for the implementation of business ideas.

Ten years have passed...

New Reality

The external environment dictates new conditions: sanctions, Covid, the development of technology have completely changed the world and the business models of companies. Today, success depends on the adaptability and speed of business change. Rostelecom saw new opportunities in virtual distributed teams. Besides reducing costs, the company receives significant benefits from the collaboration of employees from different territories, the free exchange of knowledge within the company, and ample opportunities to attract expertise from the market. 

In 2021, Rostelecom went through an organizational transformation through a change in the management model. The key task of the transformation was the formation of a service model within the company for smart growth in traditional business and the development of new areas, accelerating time-to-market.

This required a paradigm shift: from processes to customer, from function logic to service provider, from hierarchy to agile teams.  The culture of cooperation has become an important link in the implementation of the idea of ​​transformation.

I am going to share how the experience and technologies of KM helped me, as a change leader, when creating the Competence Center – a virtual distributed team in HR.

Today, the Competence Center employs 750 employees, who are managed by 7 managers and 50 team leaders. Employees work in more than 50 cities of the country in a remote/combined format. Flexible teams are formed according to the principles: territorial coverage and functional expertise.

The Competence Center provides about 100 services for businesses and employees: from recruitment and adaptation, remuneration and development, to firing and maintaining relationships with alumni. 100K employees of the company are in service.

At the stage of the Center's formation, on the one hand, it was important to retain key knowledge and expertise, on the other hand, to introduce new approaches to operational activities and reengineer business processes within a year.

What challenges do we face?

1. Team interaction.  It was important to reassemble the team quickly and set up interaction in a flat structure. To find effective team leaders who can form teams.  Create working interaction tools, flexible rules, and a unified information environment.

2. Heterogeneity of skills and experience.  Employees united in new teams worked in different environments, and had different levels of skills.  Therefore, it was important to set up communications and exchange of best practices, to align competencies through employee training.  Especially critical were the gaps in digital competencies that are essential for the work of remote teams. Analysts and programmers appeared in the teams.

To overcome the first two difficulties, we used communication and development tools:

MasterMind – exchange of experience, expertise, mistakes in small groups;

Townhalls (town hall meeting?) – general meetings of teams to synchronize and maintain a common transition context;

Confluence, Jira – project communications using a special information environment;

AutoFAQ – an automated knowledge base, an accessible bot that can recognize queries and search the knowledge base;

Development programs – we launched a large-scale training in digital competencies, customer centricity, and an employee incentive program in the "Best Service" nomination based on internal client reviews.

3. Design and operational activities at the same time. Besides the operational activities, the teams were engaged in transformation and change. Therefore, change teams were formed in parallel.

Differences of these teams:

 ● Structure and variety. Distributed roles. For example, sponsor, service leader/product owner, analyst, experts.

 ● Skills: domain expertise.  For example, when reengineering the Recruitment and Hiring process, the project team was formed from experts in recruiting, personnel administration, IT, security, and the transformation office.

 ● Culture – high involvement of team members in the process, cooperation competencies. Participants are involved in change processes up to 50% of the working time.

 ● Ability to be co-creative – besides project management, there are product development competencies.

To form change-configuration teams, we used the following team development tools:

Kick-off meetings – at the start of the project, this is a quick way to get to know each other, define the rules of interaction, goals and backlog tasks;

OKR (objectives key results) – a format for setting goals from the bottom up, taking into account customer requests and the motivation of the participants themselves;

Teaching teams in the areas of: service design, EX (EJM) tools, human centricity, facilitation, digital skills;

Agile - ways to work through weekly sprints, task backlogs, retrospectives.

In this way, we managed to combine different approaches and create a culture that encourages collaboration, experiments and customer orientation. So, for instance, interviews with candidates and recruiters allowed us to eliminate unnecessary steps and set up the employee registration process as quickly as possible. Now the candidate himself determines the date of entry into the work, digital admission has been launched through a personal account, off-line communications and introductory briefings have been excluded.

Our results:

 ● Speed. We managed to increase the speed of processes by 2-10 times. We have learned how to launch new services/products in 3-6 months. We began to implement changes faster;

 ● Service.  We have improved customers’ satisfaction.  Internal service rose to 9.58 (out of 10) in internal customer surveys.  Growth of NPS of products and services was more than 10%;

 ● Operational efficiency. The optimization effect was 20% FTE (Full-Time Employee?) and payroll.

While reconfiguring team interactions and processes, we ourselves did not notice how we became the leader of culture change in other departments of the company. Involving colleagues in cross-functional interaction while working on projects, we began to educate them and share our best practices and principles of cooperation.

Success factors for developing a collaborative culture:

1. Open communications in the digital environment.

2. Knowledge sharing and mutual learning, regular feedback.

3. New role model in flat and flexible structure.

4. Change-teams involving cross-functions.

5. Competencies: customer centricity, product approach, project activities.

To measure collaboration influence on organizational performance is still a hot issue to many of us. It is a long-term challenge for many and we are not giving up but trying and even more passionately to find a solution. 

To tell the truth we are still on our way to find the best model but ready to share our latest findings below based on diamond Industry benchmark which we consider as the most suitable metaphor for now. So we think that team look like a diamond, very similar. And we can measure the collaboration value following the same principles as in the diamond industry. 

Collaboration performance measurement is all about group performance measurement wherenever size of the group can be. Collaboration lives in groups of people. It cannot exist beyond it. So the better we collaborate – the better team, community and ecosystem we have and develop. 

B. The measurement grades

1. CARAT. In the diamond industry they consider the weight of diamond which is critical for the price. Prices demonstrate the value of the diamond. The same criteria with collaboration – number of people in a team. 

But not only the number of people. Team member's areas and level of expertise. How many areas thaey have? And what level of expertise is in that area? It makes them valuable. 

Of course, we consider the amount of mutual assets the team or community and group have. Even we have two people. Collaboration starts when two people start to collaborate. Three people are a team. Hundred which means that community. So it's a grade like the weight of a diamond.

2. COLOR. The second is the grade of color in a diamond industry almost the same as the grade of gravitation in collaboration, because diversity leads to gravitation and curiosity leads to gravitation as well. 

So the more diverse we are, the more attractive we are. The more we are curious, proactive, flexible and open-minded, the better we are trying to marry each other. In a couple it's a marriage. In a collaborative team it's like a mutual marriage. It's how much energy and passion we have to combine as one. We are moving forward to each other. Gravitation.

3. CLARITY. The third is culture. It seems like a clarity in the diamond industry. The better clarity diamond has –  the higher value, and the higher price at the end. 

Of course, transparency and trust is clarity in a collaboration. Culture. The clear personal and collaboration positioning. The better positioning we have the better others understand our strategy. Openness. No clouds. It should be very clear. 

The behavior is clear due to positioning one has. And all together the group creates in collaboration its own collaboration positioning. Team, community, ecosystem positioning. 

It is the question everybody has always been asked: who are you? As a person, as a team, as a community. It makes us clear to each other and the trust to be higher. 

And, of course, shared purpose and aligned spirit which we can have due to the culture. So it makes us even more clear to each other. It's a grade of culture.

4. CUT. And the final like in diamond: еhe better the diamond is cut, the more edges we have – the more shine, brightness, light we can extract from this diamond. The more applicable diamond is. It is the grade of productivity, applicability, which concludes the value and power of our collaboration. 

The fourth grade includes both team change readiness plus its adaptability and number of methods and tools, infrastructure the team can use. And, of course, the number and types of values, outputs and outcomes can be created and achieved. 

So it's our brief opinion on how the diamond industry 4C's grades can be a benchmark for collaboration performance measurement. We are going to update this article right after our KMGN "The collaboration course" will be completed in June, 2023. You are very welcome to join both the course and our co-creation in an area of collaboration performance measurement, global collaboration methodology development.

Our company is a medium-sized manufacturing business in printing services. We print books, promotional products and packaging. It is a family company. For a long time we lived without KM. Knowledge lived in people - company's employees. Staff turnover was small. Fortunately, we always treated the team well and they paid us the same. However, 30 years have passed. People grew up, aged and began to retire. Along with people, key knowledge began to leave. In the mid-2010s, we felt it well. Pretty painful.

Getting to know KM

This time we’ve visited KM Russia for the first time. And learned about KM. That the key knowledge in the company is to be stored and protected. Then we gathered an initiative group and began to collect key knowledge, processes and functions in documents. It wasn't easy. The team strongly resisted. KM was perceived as an additional load. Why and for whom to formalize the knowledge that you already have? We had to describe a lot ourselves through surveys, revealing the implicit knowledge of employees. We understand this already now.

First results

The implementation of the first simple rules and tools of KM has brought results and changed the mindset of business leaders.

A few years later, the building we rented was demolished, and we were forced to move to the other side of the city, losing time, money and some of the employees. For a business with 100 tons of equipment a removal is an expensive and risky process.

For that time we had formalized all the critical knowledge -  all requirements for the building: capacity, load, water supply. There were a number of schemes for how the equipment could be arranged. There were clear job descriptions. The process of training new specialists was formalized too.

So that was the first time when KM saved our business.

KM is the way of development

When we realized that we have described all the processes in the company, we seriously thought about scaling.

We have chosen two ways:

1. To purchase buildings for a second production in a completely different place - 400 kilometers from the current one.

2. To create a printing alliance.

According to this plan, we had to gather industry specialists. For example, we are mainly engaged in offset printing (books, catalogs, board games, packaging), someone makes banners, someone prints on cloth, etc. To create the printing alliance is to create a common infrastructure - a single brand, a single website, a common sales office etc. Create a company where the client could receive any services from the makerer at the manufacturer's price in one place.

We started moving in both directions.

1. A new challenge

We had faced new difficulties on the way.

It turned out that working with a remote team that you almost never see was not so easy.

It was at this time that we were nominated for the CRO (Knowledge Ready Organization) award. In the process of preparing, working with the questionnaire and the award team, we have confirmed the opinion that KM is not only properly described knowledge and processes, but also a team that works with it.

Then we realized, not in theory, but in practice, the importance of culture in working with the team.

Team culture

We attended various events organized by our KM community, joined in the co-creation of the business club. At the first opportunity, we attended presentations by international experts of KM.

The first thing we have learned for ourselves  is that culture should be accessible. First of all, it should be formalized. You can get to know it, you can influence it, you need to accept it in order to interact together.

That's where we started. We took the collaborative culture of our club as a basis. They described the values, principles and rules. We have added applied and relevant cultural codes of our company. Every morning at the planning meeting, they began to disassemble it with a team from a remote office. Gave them the opportunity to influence, complement.

In fact, we already had a formalized culture, which we discussed at the planning meetings, and then the team described the rules and principles from words and transcripts, taking into account our discussion. So our culture became their culture too. A collaborative culture. A culture where it was usual to help each other, where mutual assistance and mentoring were honored.

Of course, at first people in a provincial town looked at it strangely. Perhaps discussing culture was more like parenting for them. And then we realized that before teaching or imposing culture, we must first break down the walls between us, barriers in communication.

Here a great tool came to our aid, which we first heard from Arthur Shailey – DTT (Drink tea together).

It was not easy to talk about life with new people and, especially, with top managers, because we had a new team. We start everyday zooms with "Interesting fact". Do you know which celestial body in our Solar System has the most water? Where is it raining diamonds? How does a fox get rid of fleas? Or how do some bee species struggle with wasps ravaging hives (by the way, with the help of collaboration)?

So we began to hold our meetings. At first it was strange, but curious. Then it's interesting. Then there were discussions. Today we are waiting for the meeting to discuss interesting facts and laugh together. Only after that, charged and positive, we dive into other work issues.

This approach allowed our new Yelets production to reach a turnover commensurate with the Moscow one in two years.

That's what culture does!

Today

And what about today?

Today we understand that KM is not some separate action or decision. This is a regular activity. Continuous improvement. A life-long journey. A way of being.  And every time some goals become close, we set ourselves new ones.

Future plans

Today we face new challenges:

Setting up a culture in remote production.

We said that the culture in the distant office has achieved very good results. Office KPI grows from month to month, everyone is friendly and helps each other. There are mistakes, but these are more technical mistakes, not organizational ones. Not problems with culture or knowledge management.

However, there are problems in production. The interaction time with it is shorter and less frequent. We don't hold any planning meetings. They are boiled in their own juice. And they don't grow. That is, we cannot normally build up a team. People came and went away. Stable payments and a social package did not keep them. 

Problems in the team.

Today, having realized this problem, we  started to tighten the leader of the production to daily planning meetings. To involve them in the culture so that production managers bring the culture of business leaders to people, and not allow the toxic subculture brought by new people to develop.

Solving this problem should give the business a new leap. 

2. Alliance Fabrika

If you remember, I wrote about the two ways of development of the company. The first way I’ve described  in detail, and the second mentioned only in passing. This is the way of creating the print alliance - Fabrika. A collaborative alliance bringing together industry experts. Their assets, mostly intangible - knowledge, and reputation, will help to create the largest player in the market who could do everything in one place and do it well.

This has been my dream for almost 10 years. I have done many approaches to this, and almost every time they failed. Everyone said, we are, we are ready. You do the infrastructure, and then call. However, the low level of cooperation in small and medium-sized businesses and the competitive mentality break all plans. But we don’t give up. We built the infrastructure ourselves. It took more time? money and patience. At the same time, we were learning KM and collaboration. We studied and practiced. And today, having formed assets, having issued them and having learned a little collaboration, we are going to have a new approach.

Thanks to the experience gained over the years, by restarting the process, we have already obtained some results. Several companies have already united assets with us and joined the "collaborative alliance". But this is just the beginning! We need to unite at least 20-25 players from different industries in order to take the position we need in the market and prove to everyone that it is often more profitable to collaborate than to compete.

At last, but not at least

What to say in conclusion?

Every time you do KM, you realize that it is endless, like space. Even when you decided that you understood anything - go to the next level. 

Every time it seems to us that you've figured it out, we need to dig deeper. This is not the end, just a solid layer of soil got caught. Push the shovel harder.

Well, we believe that KM is the way, and we are going this way with passion and patience.

P.S. Thank you to the KM community for changing our view of business.

Consider the interaction between people when meeting new persons for the first time. Each of us has simple options: start interacting or ignore. Those whom we ignore, with whom we do not build any relationship, are the majority. There are two options for interaction with the rest: (1) compete for some resources/benefits, (2) collaborate to achieve some goals (personal or professional).

It is very similar to what is called in biology: eat, breed, run. Compete, collaborate, ignore!

In a situation where we ignore, everything is clear. We don't invest in relationships. The satiation of competition and collaboration is more interesting. Both behaviors are natural, we have been behaving this way since childhood. We collaborate to get pears in the garden or paint the fence together, and at the same time we compete for the right to sleep in the best place near the large window . And every year in our lives there are more and more occasions for competition and collaboration.

How we decide whom to compete with and whom to collaborate with? Usually, it is a question of resources. Where assets are limited (eg. the coastline, the bowels of the earth), competition begins. When assets are unlimited, collaboration can begin. The actual goal of both competition and collaboration is the struggle for resources. Different behaviors allow you to acquire different types of assets:

- When extracting tangible assets, we are forced to compete, because the number of resources is limited and they, among other things, tend to wear out.

- While extracting intangible knowledge resources, we collaborate – jointly create and develop assets.

Over the past few years, we have seen another round of the revolution predicted by Peter Drucker.

“Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation… Within a few short decades, society rearranges itself – its world view; its basic values; its social and political structure; its arts; its key institutions. Fifty years later there is a new world. And the people born then cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived and into which their own parents were born. We are currently living in such a transformation. It is creating the Post-capitalist society”.

Studying the success of modern companies, we can see that intangible assets are their foundation: reputation, unique knowledge, strong teams with a unique combination of competencies. The success of Pixar is the technology of creating animated images instead of hand-drawn by the artist, and fantastic competence in creating stories. Tesla's success is the reputation of its creator, and outstanding design. Even the success of McDonald's or Schlumberger is based on knowledge. This means that collaboration technologies are becoming more and more valuable. However, at the same time, a relatively small number of leaders of organizations and their teams actually take collaboration seriously and invest in it. Why is this happening?

How to manage it

53 years ago, Jack Trout first formulated the concept of “Positioning”. All these years it has served as a powerful tool to overcome competition. It allowed companies to occupy exclusive places in the minds of consumers and win in competitive comparison. Positioning allows you to gain a competitive advantage: BMW is a drive to drive, Toyota is reliability, Apple is a unique user experience (buttons that you want to lick), LinkedIn is a social network for professional relationships, Rolex is a watch that retains its value (read prices) for generations. Each of these companies has had ups and downs in their history, but they have retained their identity and have been following their ways, for which they have received recognition from consumers.

However, Positioning can do much more. Positioning is a way of doing business In a new era. Positioning is the basis for asset development. Not an old school approach, but a fundamental and modern one. In practice, positioning for an enterprise is like life for an organism. And for some businesses, this continues to be a way of competition, while for others it is a way of developing strategic assets.

In the case of competition, organizations are fighting for a piece of the pie. The more successful you are in competition, the harder it is to attack you.

The collaboration strategy aims to expand the market size. Instead of fighting for a piece of the pie, you create a bakery or cookery that can bake pies, croissants, prepare salads and brew delicious tea. In fact, it integrates proposals from different industries.

Position in the competition is the reason to buy from you instead of your competitors.

A position in collaboration is a reason to cooperate with you, and not with another.

Having succeeded in competition, you can collaborate with your competitors - thanks to this, Coopetition is born. Those who already have a strong position in the market begin to collaborate with competitors.

The stronger the position, the more the assets that are available and the more the assets that can be created. The position allows you to extract assets. The more positions you have in the more markets, the more assets you can acquire.

Positioning is the flagship of the company's development. Thanks to positioning, the company decides how and with whom to compete, how and with whom to collaborate. With a high probability, this leads to gradually replacing the share of those with whom to compete with those with whom to collaborate.

Positioning becomes the basis for all relationships with the external environment, and not only with commercial structures, but also with non-commercial ones. That is why today we are no longer talking about the need to have positioning, but about the need to correctly use it for both competition and collaboration.

Collaborative positioning is a collaborative long-term business development strategy that involves uniting with other market players for the sake of achieving a common benefit, developing the industry and entering adjacent markets or creating new markets. This is collaboration with partners with strong individual positioning. With those with whom we create a common product or even a market together, a common positioning that is not achievable by individual competitors, and together we get more than we could get separately.

What is needed for successful collaboration and development of collaborative positioning

- single culture, common values

- transparency, openness

- unique assets

- knowledge of positioning and collaboration technologies.

Instead of a conclusion

We believe that collaboration is one of the key drivers for the development of enterprises today. It allows the organization to go beyond its current limits and discover new opportunities: new markets, new products, new talented people in the team. It is the collaborative culture and collaborative technologies that allow people with expertise to create new knowledge and convert it into unique assets. Do what AI can't do yet!

However, despite all this strength, collaboration needs to be protected. Protection is needed from competition with other approaches and technologies for enterprise development. Collaboration needs positioning, in purposeful activities to occupy a place in the heads of leaders and employees of the company. For collaboration positioning, we believe that it is KM'ers who are able to help the collaboration position itself as a source of strategic assets for the company. Become irreplaceable!

SKIMC – Strategic Knowledge and Innovation Management Community has been formed as a result of long-term collaboration between KM Russia, Glink Community, kBook group, Global Virtual Collaboration project, and leading organizations, projects and activities in the area of knowledge and innovation.

We are focusing on strategic collaboration, knowledge and innovation management issues, developing collaboration between leaders for better implementation of KM, KIM, and KAM approaches and concepts for mutual benefit.

Since the year 2009, we develop SKIMC with leaders, members and participants from all over the world, but specially from the countries around Central Asia such as Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tadjikistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. We also have experts and co-leaders from Australia, Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Israel, Singapore, South Africa, and Thailand, with the support of KM-driven network leaders from Asia and Europe.

SKIMC is one of the KMGN initiators and a key drivers. Our mission is to support developing the KM discipline, leverage the effectiveness of collaboration, co-creation and innovation, create, and share the global collaborative culture.