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it is 10 15 and we have uh 28 participants and more growing so why don't we go ahead we are just so pleased today to have clemson university's center for corporate learning uh all of you wonderful gang here today and i am just going to turn the mic over to um nan man good morning everybody thank you for joining us for this presentation on succession management our presenters today are mary alice bowers gail depriest and caroline fritz meanwhile the two women behind the curtain are sally willett and jessica moss we will lay out our shared roles and objectives as well as a case study after that we'll take questions so if you have any go ahead and enter them in the chat box we'll be monitoring and teaming those up enjoy the show slide well i wanted to share with you quickly um what what what the initial driver was for tns brass to consider the need for a succession plan and what i soon learned uh after trying to learn more about how to approach that project was that we didn't just need a succession plan we needed a more a knowledge management uh system for our company and um we've had quite the journey with this group of professionals who came in to help me um certainly we've all learned a lot and i hope today we'll be able to kind of show you um that this this project that i thought was just really going to be very narrow and it was going to be a deliverable that i needed for specific purposes really came to have a life of its own so to speak and we ended up getting so much more benefit from the process so just to set the stage um tns brass had just experienced just enormous growth over over the course of probably a season of about five years we had seen uh growth in every way we were growing globally adding uh new customers um all over the world we were also just simply i was adding employees and sales people everywhere um and we found ourselves in need of an erp system who could that could handle um multiple currencies and we needed to basically had we had to teach our people how to evolve from a smaller business to a global scope and manage the growth in a way that made sense so that we could um have better decision making we had very low turnover an aging workforce these people had contributed to the success of the company and now we needed to give them the skills that they needed to help us evolve to an even larger organization and none of us had really done that before i'm a perfect example having grown up at tns so to speak many of us had been there 20 plus years and the nature of our job was simply let's just learn how to do that okay nobody's done that before but uh somebody's got to figure this out our customer needs it so we would throw some somebody at it well john can do that he's got time or whatever and so over the course of time we ended up having a lot of people who had very unique roles not necessarily a role that was the title didn't necessarily indicate what their function was so in some cases we even had people that didn't even realize how incredibly valuable they were because it was just oh well i just i've just done that for years i've been doing that that's just my part of my job so that was another element of it we also began to have the need as we acquired companies we were needing to deploy our seasoned leaders in order to assimilate companies that we were purchasing we needed to be able to send people for maybe six or eight weeks to china or to italy to help them develop their groups and uh i needed to make sure that we could keep the ship here the main headquarters of the company uh and all of our manufacturing we had to keep this ship running smoothly as we add on these other companies so and then to kind of top it all off we kind of i called the perfect storm for me because i had all of these different kind of moving pieces uh spurring me on to try to find okay we're going to have to kind of handle this well and i wanted to be a resource to our our leaders who are becoming more and more stressed iso 9000 the most recent standard that we were required to be certified to begin requiring an emphasis on uh risk management so we looked at at truly some overall risk we had as an organization and it did uh our aging workforce as well as some some very key positions we just simply didn't have backup for so we needed to look at it from that standpoint as well um sally you can advance to the next slide okay i was it took us a long time to pull the trigger on this project and it was because i had several concerns i'm a very human human resource manager and i had some some real pain points around how our people were going to engage with this and i knew that the success of our project would depend upon how well our leaders and our um our um subject matter experts how they embrace the process i didn't want them to be reluctant to share information and um some of our associates kind of have and you you probably know in your organizations you've got some folks who love being the only one who knows certain things because that makes them feel really um gives them the strokes they need or whatever and they enjoy being the go-to for certain processes and so i wanted those things handled really really delicately i was already worried that all the managers that were going to be tasked with taking part in this were stressed with the new erp conversion for that system as well as all the acquisitions we were we all already had very full plates so i wanted this to be something that they could see as manageable um and then we wanted to find a way when we were looking at um succession planning true succession planning where i had someone that had announced their retirement i didn't want them to at all feel pressured that we were trying to rush their exit or make them feel at all that we were anxious for them to go but rather that we really really value them and and i wanted that handled very very well and i wanted to honor them um and then um i also wanted to make sure that that the people that we were needing to get information from they didn't feel at all as if the only reason we want you to share this with us is because we had some agenda uh to maybe replace them or to take their job away so there were a lot of human factors that i spent a great deal of time up front with the team at clemson trying to make them make sure they understood when they engaged with our people that these were some of my concerns and so um that's kind of how we started and i'm anxious for caroline and gail to share with you um some of the ways that that they help to solve these problems and then i'm going to come back at the end and share with you some of the um the unexpected lessons and the benefits that that we had that we didn't even anticipate when we first started thank you so for the hr leader it's critical to get all players on board and align to the process they must begin to be ready the clemson team facilitated a half-day workshop for tns brass and bronze works in which key leaders and essential knowledge workers discover the interconnectedness of shared knowledge as well as determine where there is a sole owner knowledge this is also the time to establish a unified language and governance your team must begin to think about reasonable timelines and how schedules impact these interactions during this session no concrete deliverables can be identified because that will be determined by the as yet unknown knowledge in the room rather the clemson approach allows them to take the first step toward discovering what deliverables are essential slide please so we were very pleased to work with tns brass and especially as you hear mary alice speak about the way the approach uh that that she felt was important for her organization we heard that loud and clear she really wanted to empower her leaders and support them in a way that would be comfortable for them in their unique culture which was almost familial the kind of support that we saw the kind of uh people growing up there and so forth uh the retention was uh incredible um so we wanted to honor that and one of the ways we um started uh with the senior team was to bring in the herman brain dominance so what we were looking at here and and the gentle reminder to everyone is that everyone has different thinking preferences so as you begin to manage a change project like this you are going to have individuals that really are going to be very focused and need all the facts uh the numbers as much as possible but people in that lower uh quadrant the the green quadrant uh sometimes they are all about needing a plan which isn't always going to be ready at the beginning so uh being able to talk through some of that the people that fall into kind of that red quadrant and i'll talk a little bit more about that thank you sally the red quadrant those individuals are going to need more conversation around what's happening and uh and and that if they can get more of that then they can feel more comfortable with that in the upper quadrant are the individuals that like change and like experimental but sometimes they can feel a little concerned about change because they begin to worry about the freedom to create new things and so we um use this model uh with uh the organization starting with the senior team to get everyone kind of getting a sense of where maybe they tended to have their preferences were they more left hemisphere left brain oriented or they more preference for more right brain or what were their dominant cognitive uh preferences so we started with this and we started getting people kind of comfortable realizing that they could use this for their own uh filter to determine what their needs are going to be and maybe areas that might be less comfortable but also to use this as they begin to talk with their employees about some of the coming change slide please on this slide you can see that with uh our preferences uh the the quadrants a and b on the left hemisphere of the brain is more about gathering facts and information so those individuals in your organization will have a lot of questions about that and uh and so you want to be sure you're able to speak to that or at least talk about that in terms of what's coming and and what facts we know the quadrant below that are those individuals that want the timeline for the plan and and actually will be very good and have assets for helping you create that the red quadrant the lower right quadrant uh are again those individuals that uh that really you may have a little bit more of an emotional reaction to it they want to have the conversations about it they want to feel good about it and so uh and again the upper right quadrant you know there we we use this tool actually also with the sales group at tns um and what we can see here is the strengths um the upper quadrant those individuals they have the big ideas they're the ideators and they are in marketing sometimes uh they want those freedoms and they're going to have great ideas for going forward so we wanted to get a look at the strengths but we want to move on now to the next slide where you can see here's where some of the frustrations might come in for employees at tns and mary alice was very sensitive to this she wanted to make sure those individuals in that relational quadrant the lower right had the conversations felt supported uh felt that extra you know uh attention and support that they needed but she also wanted to be able to speak to the individuals who were waiting on a plan and a timeline and we didn't always have that we were still working on that um so so this kind of maps out how the different filters for how right brain or left brain how individuals were processing let's go to the next slide and this just gives you a picture of using this herman brain dominance as a thinking tool so we talked about a whole brain process when we're in the room together we talked about the fact that you know getting the facts together so that we can start working on kind of laying out the timeline but what kind of training needs to occur and and then also what what's the vision for the future and as people could kind of weigh in and see where they tend to sit at this table in terms of their thinking preferences it helped them better understand how they might contribute more boldly but areas that might make them a little maybe not as comfortable next slide please one of the things that we did is an appreciative inquiry exercise and we actually asked that senior team where would you like to see tns in five years and and in this appreciative inquiry model which is actually used by nasa and other uh even sometimes whole towns will use whole cities will use appreciative inquiry we asked the question where do you see yourself and we had people write you know in teams write articles you know wall street journal article what they say about tns for us in five years so the team had some fun with that but it also gave them license to really think about what can it look like in the future what would we like it to look like in the future and really start you know really giving people a license and an experimental um space to to really think about that next slide please um so that's everything i have except we did also add in a coaching feature and we did help people start beginning coaching culture conversations asking individuals about the space they were in and we we built that into the program as well caroline thank you gail good morning everybody i'm caroline fritz and i'd like to start with a quick level set knowledge management is getting the right information to the right person at the right time you've probably heard of just in time manufacturing well most of us aren't factory workers and our processes aren't visible we're knowledge workers and not all of us are the best at documenting the processes we use and the information that we slowly over time accumulate in our brains and the thought of that can actually be pretty overwhelming so where do we start well i thought it would be helpful to look at a couple of the guiding principles of knowledge management first there are different types of knowledge knowledge is a combination of both explicit and implicit knowledge explicit knowledge includes codified data such as that found in documents and implicit knowledge refers to experienced based knowledge it's this it's the stuff that we hold up here so one approach of knowledge management is to look at existing documentation and identify what additional data and information might be required to optimize the use of that documentation so that can be pretty overwhelming which brings us to the second guiding principle which is not all knowledge is created equal somehow we need to figure out what knowledge is critical to our business strategy what knowledge is critical to our customers and what knowledge is critical to our organizational goals next slide please so before we do let's ask an honest question why how important is this really we've been getting along just fine without implementing knowledge management so let's consider this according to a mckinsey report employees spend 1.8 hours every single day which is 9.3 hours per week on average searching and gathering information so put another way businesses hire five employees but only four show up for work the fifth is off searching for answers but not contributing any value secondly idc data shows that the knowledge worker spends about two and a half hours every single day or roughly thirty percent of their work day searching for information sixty percent of custom company executives felt that time constraints and lack of understanding of how to find information were preventing their employees from finding the information they needed i'm sure you all can relate to this but it's pretty shocking isn't it as an industrial engineer or a process improvement engineer i can tell you we spend a lot of time improving our factory processes think automation but we don't often consider how we can make our back office processes more efficient yet some estimate our back office accounts for 80 percent of our business expenses so if this doesn't convince you that knowledge management is important perhaps this will and mary alice alluded to this in 2015 the international organization for standardization added managing organizational knowledge to the quality management system standard or iso 9001 specifically the iso requirement for organizational knowledge asks that organizations determine what knowledge is needed to operate the business maintain that knowledge and make it available as needed and consider how your organization will update its knowledge base to support the changing needs in your business so whether it makes good business sense or you're required to implement some form of knowledge management as part of your risk management strategy to support your iso 9001 certification let's now take a look at how we helped tns brass identify and capture critical knowledge next slide please having worked with the tns leadership team on their succession planning strategy we gained some insight into both the company company culture as well as their business strategy and based on this analysis we learned a few things first as mary alice said and like most of you all this is a company that has a lot on its plate they're growing they're in a highly competitive market they're implementing new systems and they're a lean organization we knew that depending on how many possible areas of critical knowledge we found we might not have the time to capture all of it we have to prioritize so taking into account eight different criteria we developed a simple prioritization tool that would allow us to measure the critical criticality of each potential knowledge capture project next slide we decided to take a bilateral approach we started with a top-down view working with each of the leadership team individually to identify two things for each of their functional areas first where is the critical knowledge and second where is it at risk a quick side note wherever you have one person that holds some bit of critical knowledge regardless of how close to retirement that person is that knowledge is at risk so we used an interview process and we asked each of the leadership team these questions what are the top priorities in your functional area what does your team have to do well in order to meet your organizational goals what processes or tasks are involved in meeting those goals what people or roles are involved and finally what would happen if the people that hold this knowledge just didn't show up for work and then we got in a little deeper and met with the managers in these areas and asked those same questions and from here we had a list of 10 or so employees that were perceived to hold at risk critical knowledge in the knowledge business we call these folks subject matter experts or smes and i'm sure you have heard that before so now in the case of tns we were pleasantly surprised to find that in many parts of the business employees had actually been cross-trained and had a backup resource for their position i've worked with some clients where we've identified at least 80 potential knowledge capture projects and we have to go through a prioritization exercise to whittle that list down into something more manageable so although we developed a prioritization tool we're happy to not have to choose in this case between projects so next we employed the bottom-up approach so for each of those 10 smes that had been identified that held at-risk critical knowledge we identified the people processes and systems that they supported we developed a survey tool and asked all of the people that interacted with that particular sme from fellow employees to customers the following questions what type of direction information or decision support do you regularly seek from this sme if you didn't get the question answered by this me could you still complete the process or get the job done and what does that smee do in his or her role that no other team member can so this tool helped us to further refine our list of smes and it also gave us the specific focus areas within each of the smes base of knowledge that needed to be documented so each focus area now represents a manageable and discrete knowledge capture project next slide but before we moved forward with the interview process to capture the knowledge we identified an additional tool that allows us to dovetail once again with this succession planning effort rather than have a group of consultants capturing and documenting information what if we pulled in a potential successor to that sme that could participate in the interview process and help document some of this at-risk critical knowledge this would allow tns to both capture and transfer the knowledge at the same time and could be an excellent development opportunity for other high potential employees so we called these folks knowledge stewards we also used a cross-functional team approach in our knowledge capture work sessions bringing in folks from other functional areas upstream and downstream of the work process of each sme thus allowing for further alignment to tns business strategies including their system implementation where identifying requirements and documenting end-to-end processes was also needed this cross-functional approach allowed for a final unexpected win so we often work in silos i'm sure you're very familiar with that it's not always a bad thing it helps us stay focused it allows us to optimize our individual work but when we do this we don't see the end-to-end process when when we step back and see the end on process and how our work affects those downstream from us and how we are affected by those upstream from us we're able to optimize that whole process at tns this allowed us to identify some really valuable process improvement opportunities that not only benefit their internal team but their suppliers partners and customers as well so on a final note i just want to add this one thing would you rather the keepers of your critical knowledge your smes be tied up wrestling with systems answering questions and supporting other employees or would you rather them spend their time helping develop your long-term strategy and focusing on delighting your customers gail back to you thank you caroline one additional um component of this project is that we involved a clemson mba executive class which actually writes case studies on regional businesses so tns through the years has has won many awards they're a unique culture and our students uh in this class were very interested in in studying their culture next slide please our students uh did many interviews um internally and they started to capture some of the the points about this culture of success like the fact that 85 percent of orders are shipped the same day that's just standard at tns uh they also offer to the market an efficiency rate of about 95 meaning they reach back they touch back at a very high rate in terms of staying connected to customers there's a very high level of trust that's built into the interactions um that mary alice alluded to earlier a lot of respect uh and making sure that you know if one of us succeeds we know that all of us will succeed so that this culture had grown over a period of time and uh our students were fascinated with that next slide we interviewed one of the interviews i was with ken gallagher the vice president of global sales and he articulated in his opinion that the the mantras the the the way that um individuals approach each other at tns on the whole it's about being respectful of co-workers exercising true leadership leading with integrity striving for excellence tns invests in its employees they have created an environment of respect and collaboration there's an encouragement for vision and for innovating and the company is known to take risk intelligent risks calculated risk as employees have ideas and so that's the the background that our students found in their interview with ken and in the next slide please the case study uh recommendation that they made was to define and document the values that are apparent in this organization and to make sure that in the future there's a hiring for these values so codifying values and also rewarding the values um personification of values uh and there's just an article referenced here about about starbucks which is very much a culture of uh employee first and uh and so that was shared with tns brass but these are the recommendations made by our case studies and go to the next slide please so i'll move this back to mary alice but our students absolutely enjoyed working with the culture and and wanted to really underscore that the culture is a big part of the success of tns so i i realize now at the very beginning i didn't even introduce myself um so i'm mary alice bowers and i've been with tns for um it'll be 30 years next year and my my position here has has morphed uh certainly because i've done a little bit of everything starting in the customer service area and um so i've literally grown up with the people here we found this whole process um of course i i was so intimidated when this obviously fell in my plate uh that that i needed to be the one responsible for getting this done for our organization but i had no idea how to approach it so i remember the first time i sat down with nan and described okay here's what i need to do here are all of them kind of it's multifaceted here's some of my problems what can we do and and they really did work with me over a period of several months before we even involved another person at tns because we wanted to make sure that um i wanted to make sure it was embraced from the get-go so i spent a lot of energy making sure that i felt like we were going to present it in a way that each person would be able to see how buy-in was going to help their own unique management problems so then uh we began this series of meetings uh with the the leadership training that gail described so um i found at the end of this there were so many different uh things that first of all this is my ipad because it thinks siri thinks i've asked it something sorry um we um we learned so much just new language i think there was a a great morale contribution it was it was beneficial to the morale of the group because a lot of people i do think underestimated how critical their their processes were how important they were to the growth of the company and so we were able to honor that and kind of highlight look at where we've come do you remember when you used to do it this way and now we're doing it this way um and so i think um the having the occasion to have a project where we were all working together and where we had permission to discuss kind of the historic story of the story of our um our evolution it was really really rewarding for a lot of folks um we we did learn one it was an overwhelming project to me when i looked at our whole group of 320 people here in travelers rest how am i going to make sure that we capture this knowledge appropriately and we plan for succession properly having an outside resource to come in and help us define where the real risk was and get it into a manageable list of uh projects was just really invaluable to me we were pleasantly surprised that because our production area is so um it's procedure driven we're iso 9000 certified and we we do an awful lot of cross-training caroline mentioned earlier we had very little risk in our production area because of because we do have a collaborative workforce this is something i learned overall if your workforce is collaborative there's less risk seems kind of um uh basic but it did bring us a lot more confidence that we're you know we're okay if we lost somebody for whatever reason in these areas we're really going to be okay because there's a lot of people with hands and eyes on that and they know what they're doing um also having the outside resource helped us when maybe it was a topic that was particularly sensitive and i knew that there was it was going to move somebody the wrong way when somebody tried to intrude into that area of responsibility having this engineer caroline who was there for the sole purpose of saying okay i'm going to find out what is the valuable knowledge that you you keep um it was less threatening and it helped us go there so to speak some some issues that have been maybe bottlenecks or some some problem areas where we've had with collaboration between groups having the outside person be a leader on that helped us to get beyond that and so i found that to be very very helpful between the departments was a natural evolution of the process we found that and this is just for instance maybe we had a monday morning report that was being generated in three different departments john was generating this report for use uh in sales uh carol was putting out this report for outside sales people and another person in accounting was generating this report for internal uh users and so we found out hey basically three people are creating the same report why don't you all have one report and you share this information it helps us with all kinds of things so process improvements were a natural outgrowth of this um and then finally i'll say that our uh ken gallagher our vice president of global steel he took this kind of to the to the next level when we finished doing his work and we we realized how um how much our people embraced it and how much good we gained he started using this when we would go pitch to new customers he used this to share with them uh look tnf brass uh we're not gonna leave you in a lurch this week we've got it going on as far as how we're making sure that we have lots of people uh trained to do the things that are important to you um the salesperson that you have grown to know and love and trust even though she's retiring we've spent the last six months to really get uh gaining from her how what she's doing and how important it is and and we're not going to miss the beat um we're going to introduce you to your new person so we were able to use the information that caroline helped us organize for um preparing uh specific onboarding processes for new salespeople we developed training materials for our customer service area just using the knowledge management materials that were created we were able to use those internally for several different ways and then at the end of all of this i also was able to successfully get my succession plan done and i feel like at the end of it we really had a very complete um picture of where we were where we had gaps you know where i needed to focus on maybe hiring someone to fill certain gaps um and as i'll close by saying this gail's material at the very beginning where we looked at that um i can't remember the official of the hermann brain dominance that helped me look at diversity and hiring for diversity in a really new light we recognized very early on they placed we all did the test and they placed our um our results down on top of each other so we could see where our organization had strengths and weaknesses where we had most people and we it was very clear that we've got a lot of engineering a lot of production months a lot of very serious and capable structure people and we were a little bit light on uh creativity and change people who were not averse to change and so bringing that to light in a context of discussion helped us see that you know even though it might be more comfortable to hire more people that are just like you really what our company needs to have our full um full full decision making um is to hire some people with some different skill sets and so that gave me new um new initiatives and new ways of looking at how we can better the company in our hiring processes as well and so i think now nan are you going to help guide us through the question in nasty time uh we have a few questions ready to go sally um why don't you kick off the first question we'll give it to mary alice uh how long did the entire project take from from when i first began um engaging with the actual employees i would say we took six or eight months deciding how to approach the project and me learning me learning a lot um but once we kicked it off with our leadership team with those first meetings um from that time forward it took about a year a year and maybe two or three months so um when we really got into the meat of it with caroline and and mary i have a follow-up is how long how much did this take away from production or did it oh it didn't it couldn't take away from production okay not at all and i'd like to add mary alice wanted no surprises in terms of the billing cycle and we worked out a monthly fee and that was the way we handled the whole project throughout the length of it so do we need some some more questions um i've got some here um so you know in determining your organization's readiness uh for succession planning and knowledge management um mary alice can you give us a little more detail about working through that documentation and and how we were able to assist you with that well i i don't think we were ready we had we had to have um caroline's help to understand even how to get ready um so she she made it very approachable when you when you use words that are unfamiliar to to our people one of the things that i feared about this very basically was we had never done this before and what would be read into that you know why are they doing this are they getting ready to are we getting ready to sell the company why is she what's her motivation for wanting this all of a sudden so i had to really really start with look we've got to explain why we want to get this done and and kind of prove our case for why this is going to be good for you why this is going to help you um one of the things that was really nice is is having that gap analysis okay you're good you're doing good here you're doing good here it looks like all this is covered but this is a very obvious place where you don't have any backup this person right here if they're not if they miss work um you have to wait that job waits until the next time they're they're here but what if they don't ever come back you know what if for whatever reason um we didn't have a lot of this documentation in place at all until we started approaching this project so we had procedures in place in the manufacturing area but a lot of our more created areas marketing uh sales where those those um are really close to the customer they're very responsive very nimble they're constantly pivoting to do whatever the next day calls for those processes are not documented so um here's where we found that we we needed to spend our energy i hope that answered the question i'm not sure it did it did um and caroline i was going to ask you about the documentation process itself how you manage it how tns assisted with that and how you determined what the best documentation was to use so i am not a fan of creating documentation for the sake of putting in a binder and putting it somewhere and just having it just in case i like to make as i mentioned when i we first started or if i shared about knowledge management we want to make sure it's the right information at the right time to the right people so the inquiry was regarding what doc what what documentation uh or what tools to use to share the documentation was a matter of what tools does tns already use uh what systems and tools and processes do they already have in place for sharing information and i want to add something tns has an incredible culture in place around knowledge sharing if you go to the tns website you can easily find drawings for for all the different parts and products that they sell they're very open in a knowledge sharing has a knowledge sharing sort of culture and regarding the actual um getting that knowledge out of people's heads and turning it into something and this kind of speaks to how long the process took uh one of the reasons that that our process took a year to a year and a half was just you know these people are busy you know tns has a lot of other projects a lot of other priorities so a lot of that was just around scheduling and getting getting people's time but for each knowledge capture project there were probably two to four uh workshops or meetings that that i facilitated and those might have been 90 minutes to two hours and so if you imagine for each of your subject matter experts it was about 12 hours total of their time and we collaborated to create the documentation i do that on my time we would bat you know documentation back and forth and again we had knowledge stewards to help with that so all in all i would say from the the subject matter expert and knowledge steward uh time standpoint it was probably around 20 hours total per project so it's not a humongous investment of individual employees time one last insight i'd like to make i remember when mary alice might remember this but gale and i certainly remember when we got gail's survey information back one of one of the participants from mary alice's executive leadership team had crossed the instructions and so instead of giving gail all best possible answers he gave her all worst possible answers and it was a huge insight we realized of course that what had taken place but um gail you've always tried to be available when needed as a resource throughout this whole process and just talk a little bit about that how it impacted you and you learned and how you hope it impacted tns you know i i had read about tns i'd seen awards that they won and i'd be like wow they won the silver crescent award or whatever what are they doing up there and so um getting to go in and meet and their you know senior team and as mary alice said it was so interesting to see them all come together and really have that moment of reflection on all that they had accomplished and really to see people around the room affirm we always ask the question what's your most proud moment and the stories they told you know would just make you cry you know the big success with the customer you know the time they all work together to pull something through you know they had stories that were just phenomenal and it was so just to get to be a part of that and witness that uh it was an amazing thing it really was that reflection point i will never forget and and then to see their dreams for going forward and and again the collaboration in the room is it's just not what you see every day and so i think that uh for me to be any part of that and any part of helping people kind of look at their own information and go wow this is me you know i do have these preferences and this other area doesn't interest me as much but now i know that you know so uh and and get to share that information with each other and uh so it was an amazing experience i was grateful to be part of it as all of us were and mary alice was a terrific terrific partner are there any other questions out there sally um yes i think when you look at the knowledge management process how does it differ let's say for a non-profit or a small company as compared i don't know who wants to take that i can i can give that a shot based on my experience working with both not-for-profit and for-profit to be honest there's really not too much of a difference organizations have you know areas where knowledge is critical and most organizations these days are very lean and so oftentimes you will find that you have one person that does accounts payable or one person that handles pricing increases or programs or deals with a specific customer or a client so there's really not a whole lot of difference in the way that knowledge is managed in non-profit versus for-profit organizations anything else anyone yeah also uh kind of going on that um caroline what is the difference between knowledge management and production management so knowledge management is really specific to information that's needed for people to do their jobs it could be in the production area it could be around a specific piece of machinery trouble a troubleshooting when it when there's a problem with a specific piece of machinery or you know on the on the office side it could be troubleshooting a system or how we handled a problem on a particular project in the past so it's but it's all about information and it's and it's largely information that's up here in our heads that we want to make sure that we're that we're sharing more effectively uh production management is really related to uh managing how your business produces whatever product it is you produce um and it's it's much more reliant on your uh managing your resources your your machinery your processes your equipment your your personnel okay thank you um and so uh i can assume uh that everybody had complete buy-in um at the start right uh mary alice oh i'm not gonna paint a picture that it was this perfect storybook from the beginning we always have uh i think personalities that are uh suspicious or just reluctant to share just by nature of their personality so we have some of that here but all in all i think as one thing that happened is uh that really helped i can remember this specifically i worried that some of our folks who were really truly approaching retirement it was kind of known that they maybe they hadn't announced their their uh the date they were going to leave but it was kind of obvious that they were like working toward retirement we wanted to make sure that we we captured their knowledge make sure we were prepared for that but then then we came to realize we had several of those but then we had this one young man who had started to work for us about and had been with us about five years his job had evolved because the company had exploded since he had come he had a lot of he was he's one of our super users for excel he understood data understood how to manipulate data and could generate get questions answered quickly for lots of different people so john had become a very critical part of our work very fast and we maybe maybe all the different managers didn't realize that other people were dependent upon him too but through the course of this process it was like hey we got some risk right here if we lost john we're gonna so he's like i don't know 30 years old he might not have been 30 at the time so when i had some questions about well why are you already talking to me about this i don't i don't know if i'm going to retire it's probably going to be at least five more years i could say well listen we're not doing this because you're retiring we're doing this because you you could do anything you may just leave us tomorrow what if you get recruited or john's doing this we see that there's a similar risk with john and so we were able to really believably say this necessarily it doesn't necessarily have to do just with your approaching retirement this is organizational risk you are the only person that knows how to do this you've been the only person here doing this job for the last 25 years we got to have somebody see what you're doing and and understand how you're doing it so that helped us uh with it but and then on some of the ones that uh it was painful for some to have to pull their drawer out and explain their their system for how they uh decided certain things and we even had one lady that her her programs were called the drawer programs absolutely nothing was out there saved it was clearly a manual process and so then there's where we were able to encourage toward process improvement and how can how can you maybe get this done more easily and caroline was great at that um kind of helping us learn how to share information uh much more efficiently so um i think by the end of it there were they were less threatened um and then the way that the or the interview process went i think once they got into the room started answering the questions and started understanding how the process was going to work then that the trust came and i can i can add on i can add on to that uh just from a from my perspective a big piece of knowledge management and knowledge capture and transfer is organizational change management and uh by and large most people we all have this human need to be seen and to be heard to be validated and once our even you know starting with the leadership team and working down to the smes and even the people that work with the smees and helping identify those focus areas people felt valued they felt heard and so there was an uh that added benefit of feeling like they matter and so mary alice alluded to that with the smes but it really goes across the board that people need to to feel heard and then in some of these uh workshops where we had cross a cross-functional team assembled but it was really to capture knowledge from one particular smee and we ended up with these process improvement opportunities i've i've never worked with a cross-functional team to map out a process where light bulbs didn't go on and people didn't say oh my gosh that's the way you process this information well i could provide it in this other format and it will be much easier for you to upload to that system and so people generally when given the opportunity like to improve how their work process works for them and so uh this gave people an opportunity to make changes to their process and improve the way they do things and make their work life easier so i think once once we got into it it becomes a fun energized uh process and i think at the end of the day um pretty much everyone that i met with or talked with was happy to have that opportunity to share what they know and what they do awesome thank you so much and i think that that brings kind of everything full circle and that you get the buy-in from you know leadership and then allowing people really to come in into a company but in the process of meeting people where they are and not necessarily trying to pull them along but meeting them where they are and letting them know that this is a process that is only going to make everything better but you really have to to do it in that caring way so thank you so much for that i think we're almost at the end of our time so if anyone else has any questions please enter the chat room and let us know sally will let us know so uh we're we're seeing that there don't appear to be questions out there um i'd like to thank everybody for attending and i'd love to give kudos to my excellent panelists my wonderful uh back office people sally and jessica in this case only they're not normally back office uh it's been an honor to be here with g sherm today and we look forward to other ways to interact with all of you thank you for joining us today um go tigers