Saturday, 25 April 2009


Quantified KM success stories number 5 - database uploads


A company was uploading country data to a new database - firstly data from Africa, secondly data from Brazil, thirdly data from Canada. As this was repeat activity, they decided to introduce Knowledge Management to the exercise. This took the form of an After Action Review after the African deployment, updated after the Brazilian deployment. The output was a simple note, short and concise, not more than a side of A4 paper, but containing really valuable tips and hints about how the upload should be conducted.

The result was that the Africa deploment took a month, the Brazilian deployment took two weeks, and the Canadian deployment took three days - a tenfold performance increase compared to Africa.

As our contact said at the time "When our database adminstrator called me after three days and said she was ready to come home, I thought - Oh my goodness, what are people going to say! I wasn't sure how to react to that. But I spoke with the manager, and she really was done, and it was an excellent job. So it was a great feeling to know that all that preparation and all those learning experiences had been so valuable to us down the line".

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