Problem:
To identify technical experts of emerging technologies and leverage their knowledge in web development organization.
Situation:
This is one of the problem which I faced while working at a web development company. We were more than 60 employees in the web development team. As new technologies are emerging with exponential rate so it is very difficult in any company to learn all of these along with the work. But, I observed that in the team there were few people who were always keep up-to-date themselves with the technology. While working on projects rest of the employees usually go to those few people to take any technical help. But, those few people were not always able to help others due to work time pressure.
The gather data to do this analysis will not be difficult at all, as we share a common email distribution list, so easily I can send survey asking the below questions:
By - Vinay K. Tanwar
To identify technical experts of emerging technologies and leverage their knowledge in web development organization.
Situation:
This is one of the problem which I faced while working at a web development company. We were more than 60 employees in the web development team. As new technologies are emerging with exponential rate so it is very difficult in any company to learn all of these along with the work. But, I observed that in the team there were few people who were always keep up-to-date themselves with the technology. While working on projects rest of the employees usually go to those few people to take any technical help. But, those few people were not always able to help others due to work time pressure.
I want use SNAs to answer the following questions:
Q1: Who are the overly connected people to whom most of the employees turned for getting technical help?
Q1: Who are the overly connected people to whom most of the employees turned for getting technical help?
Q2: To identify name of the employees who are not connected
to anyone.
Q3: To identify employees who are outside the
web development team but have helped employees of our team.The gather data to do this analysis will not be difficult at all, as we share a common email distribution list, so easily I can send survey asking the below questions:
By using above survey results I will be able to know centrality
measures of who has the highest number of in-degree, high eigenvector and minimum closeness. These answers will
give me the names of the people who are technically very sound, popular, or
totally isolated.
As I know that most of the time due to time crunch technically sound people are not able to help, I want to implement below actions to resolve this problem:
As I know that most of the time due to time crunch technically sound people are not able to help, I want to implement below actions to resolve this problem:
Action 1: I will
publicize these technically sound people in the whole web development team as
“Maverick”. To create a knowledgeable network I will ask these Mavericks not to
answer all the questions themselves as that is also not possible due to time,
but direct people to other employees who they know also have sound technical
knowledge but are less popular.
Result: Few other new members will be identified due this exercise.
Action 2: Schedule a regular meeting among these Mavericks to know if they are facing any problems or they are finding any key behavioral change.
Result: This will be a kind of pulse check if we are going in a right direction or not.
Action 3: I will create a mobile platform which can be accessed by phone, iPad or computers. These platform will bring all the employees closer. Due to its mobility, employees can check and respond while commuting to and fro from the office.
Result: This will increase the participation of all the employees. People will reply as per their convenience.
Action 4: I will create the internal blogs, event calendar, recognition page and forums. We will also create a repository like GIT for sharing best practices and reusable code/libraries.
Result: Reusable code will save lot of time and thus employees will be able to contribute more to the community. Writing code using best practices is very important for a company, as client always prefers it and thus it will contribute in getting more business in long term.
Action 5: I will also introduce “Gamification” in the whole process of knowledge management system. Every employees will get specific points on the basis of their contribution and after accumulation certain number of points they will get badges. An automated score card of the points will be sent to all the employees each week and on monthly basis top three contributors will be recognized company wide.
Result: This will increase participation and motivation to learn new technologies whenever they get time.
Result: Few other new members will be identified due this exercise.
Action 2: Schedule a regular meeting among these Mavericks to know if they are facing any problems or they are finding any key behavioral change.
Result: This will be a kind of pulse check if we are going in a right direction or not.
Action 3: I will create a mobile platform which can be accessed by phone, iPad or computers. These platform will bring all the employees closer. Due to its mobility, employees can check and respond while commuting to and fro from the office.
Result: This will increase the participation of all the employees. People will reply as per their convenience.
Action 4: I will create the internal blogs, event calendar, recognition page and forums. We will also create a repository like GIT for sharing best practices and reusable code/libraries.
Result: Reusable code will save lot of time and thus employees will be able to contribute more to the community. Writing code using best practices is very important for a company, as client always prefers it and thus it will contribute in getting more business in long term.
Action 5: I will also introduce “Gamification” in the whole process of knowledge management system. Every employees will get specific points on the basis of their contribution and after accumulation certain number of points they will get badges. An automated score card of the points will be sent to all the employees each week and on monthly basis top three contributors will be recognized company wide.
Result: This will increase participation and motivation to learn new technologies whenever they get time.
Action 6: The
employees who are disconnected as per the social network analysis, I will
assign them the role of Moderator, who will run the flow of the forum.
Result: They will also get engaged and now will become the part of the community.
Action 7: We will include employees outside our web development team who have helped employees of web development team in our community, so that they can also contribute whenever possible.
Result: This will extend our community and cross functioning of the teams will help the company grow.
Result: They will also get engaged and now will become the part of the community.
Action 7: We will include employees outside our web development team who have helped employees of web development team in our community, so that they can also contribute whenever possible.
Result: This will extend our community and cross functioning of the teams will help the company grow.
Due to in-house hardware as well as open-source software the
cost of the platform will be negligible also, the man hour involved for setting
up the platform will be minimum.
I am confident that due to the detailed SNO-analysis I will
be able to leverage technical knowledge of the employees and also will be able
to create knowledge platform to help everyone.
By - Vinay K. Tanwar
3 comments:
Excellent. Well-thought-out and demonstrating a good grasp of SNA techniques and the kind of outcomes they can produce that can have real effect on an organization. My only quibble is calling the sought-after people "mavericks". They are busy, often bottlenecked people, and they don't have time to be mavericks! Only other question is what SNA measure will you use (other than number of connections) to determine qualification for a badge? Overall, really nicely done.
Very nice application of SNA. If you do end up doing this survey, you may want to clarify the question of "number of times seek help" -- you should have them estimate per month, per week, etc. Otherwise your results will be skewed based on the length of time any given person was at a company.
Action 1 is a particularly good idea. Creating some sort of system for identifying who is expert at which systems/processes, etc. would most certainly save your company time. Good luck!
@Christopher Tunnard
Thank you professor for your detailed feedback.
There are two type of motivations intrinsic and extrinsic. Research shows that intrinsic motivation lasts longer than the extrinsic motivation. Challenge, curiosity, competition and recognition are few factors that motivate a person intrinsically. I have seen at work that how a person feels when he/she has been recognized in the monthly meeting. So, we will promote intrinsic motivation by above strategy.
For the qualification of badge we will develop a matrix system in PHP/ Javascript which includes technicality of topic answered, number of times answered, number of people referred that code in their work, level of satisfaction of the person who asked the question. All of the above can be easily tracked with the analytic services. We will use automated application to make an efficient and economical system that will not require any further human interaction.
@Christina Filipovic
Thank you for your feedback.
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