How valid is your knowledge?

My friend Nick Milton from Knoco wrote this the other day on his blog. I think it has some great lessons that can be applied to the military community. ——- Knowledge stores need to determine the various validity levels of the knowledge they contain. Knowledge comes in different levels of trust, and you need to make it clear to the reader what level applies to the documentation they are reading.

There are three main levels:

1. Mandatory, or “Must Do”. This is the level of company standards, and everybody reading this particular process documentation needs to be very clear that they need to follow exactly what’s written. If there is a major problem, they need to get in touch with the process owner and discuss it with them, but that the default should be to follow this documentation exactly.
2. Advisory, or “Should Do”. This is the level of best practices, and everybody reading this particular process documentation needs to be clear that this is the best way to approach this particular process, based on current company knowledge. However there is always the possibility to improve on best practice, and if somebody can find an even better way, then that’s great. So Advisory process is advised, but not compulsory. However if people ignore advisory knowledge and things go wrong, some awkward questions may be asked.
3. Suggested, or “Could Do”. This is the level of good ideas or good practices that others in the organization have used, which the reader should feel free to reuse or re-adapt to his or her own context.

These good ideas can still save the reader a lot of time and effort, but there is no real requirement to copy them. In BP drilling in the late 1990s, corporate process documentation was divided into these three levels of validity, and these were labeled Principles, Processes and Practices. This labeling made it very clear to the reader how much scope they had to vary the process from what was in the documentation. My colleague Tom, in his book Knowledge Management for Operations and Manufacturing, tells about the BP Operations Excellence toolkit, which illustrates this well. The BP Operations Excellence toolkit is structured around the level of validation that has been applied to the knowledge.

At one level there is the highly vetted, approved knowledge in the form of corporate standards and required practices, which are referenced under the heading ‘The BP Way’. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the knowledge in the Question and Response system, eCLIPS, which is totally unvetted. BP went a step further and provided a ‘health guide’ to the advice you were receiving. Captured knowledge is presented in a hierarchy, as follows; •The “BP Way” These tools describe the way BP does business (ie BP policy). This should be the first place to look when identifying ways (the “what” and “how”). •Good Practices These describe good practices identified for the relevant elements by either experience from operating assets or subject matter experts. •Community discussion forum

This section links you to any questions (and responses) that have been asked about the relevant element and allows you to ask the Community if you have been unable to find an answer in the toolkit. All entries are purely voluntary and are not validated by Subject Matter Experts. This hierarchy is very important as it gives the reader a sense of how reliable the knowledge might be. Thus if the advice provided is in the form of The “BP Way” then the reader knows that this is a fully validated and approved policy or procedure and can be followed with confidence. At the bottom end of the scale, advice provided via the community forum, which is not validated, needs to be treated with a lot more caution.