Multiplying Value of Expert Community interacting with the Multiple Operational Team

Last week I talked about harnessing the experienced community for knowledge management, the concept enablement to contribute through "crowd source". This week I would like to expand the concept with the virtual expert team and how critical enabling this community of knowledge and experience to be empowered to work in real time with the plant, operational staff, enabling real-time decisions.

In January we introduced the operational landscape in 2020, where projected tenures in roles or locations to be below 2.4 years, (I believe will be less than this in many areas). The other notable observation was that 1 in 3 of the workforce will be in project work vs. careers, temporarily engaged to supply expertise and skill to a project, or situation. Giving rise to a "vacuum" knowledge effect when they leave, often causing an uncertainty, lack of confidence in making decisions.

Introducing the challenges of enabling decisions, with lack of experience.

Companies talk about their experts either in the company or in partners, who are stretched and how they keep "taking the expert to the problem" and the need to transition to "taking the problem to expert".

During the last two weeks I have been engaged with a couple of large distributed projects, in environments where there is 20% turn over of expertise from trade’s people, operational, maintenance, process experts and staff. The growth in companies investigating or implementing "operational centers" is indicative of the challenge as the experts can be located in a central location, and interact with multiple sites. In theory, this works, in practice the challenge is the expert could be on site, could be traveling, and often in order to retain the expert he must be able to contribute in a location of their choice.

Companies are also looking to multiply the value from these experts requiring they are not restricted to only contributing to their local plant, or teams. As companies look to align and manage the end to end value chain these experts could be in  operations, planning, maintenance, engineering, process, IT, control quality, etc., become critical assets.

The concept of significantly reducing the "time to performance/ expertise" is key built on a number of foundational approaches, all possible today:

1/ Knowledge systems that enable natural contribution with knowledge management to gather value and maintain the value leveraging technologies that harness "crowd sourcing", of the expert community.

2/Embedding of operational processes shifting to "intelligent work" with context information for declines and recommended actions all associated in the work item. Gathering these operational best practices from the experts, at all levels in the company and embedding into the operational system for consistent behavior to situations.

3/ Virtual expert communities that can be notified in real-time, access status and information in consistent and trusted context. Viewing the same information as the plant operational staff, but being able to apply their own analysis, experience and expertise to share with the plant operational workers for decisions. Key is the expert is working from where ever he is, on what ever device, and can collaborate, share and contribute. The expert could be in a company or a supply, but is part of the "virtual trusted expert" community seeing only the information they need, to be easily accessible to the plant user, and no effort to access.

So as a situation develops, a plant worker can focus on that situation, and see all the real virtual experts for that situation who are on line and their skill. They can chat, they can share, by dragging and dropping, and they can talk, all in a couple of key strikes or gestures. This collaboration must be natural, combined with core trust of the expert, and system that the advice from the expert is relevant to the current situation. Also, the ability to call on the knowledge system for like situations and draw information easily.

Now the experts are contributing to multiple sites, and situations without traveling and contributing to knowledge capture at the same time. This whole concept is paradigm shift in knowledge and expertise, but is the foundation for companies to be able accommodate this transitional operational landscape.

Rotating Staff, Worker Retention becomes key Design Considerations

After 2 weeks in Asia, and the 2 weeks before travelling Australia and USA, the concern of worker retention, and the different attitude of the Gen  Y, rotating work force is of real concern.  In China they already shifted to an educated GenY late Gen x population of workers keen to learn, jump to experience rapidly. With this comes ambition to change, and experience so many discussions talked centered on worker retention.

This discussion will continue to grow as people realize the reality that people will take on roles for shorter times, rotating locations, or advancing the ladder, moving from company to the company as opportunities arise. In software; we saw this in the “.com” era, where we saw a 20% turn over, but with that we saw  evolution in the work environment.  The idea as attract and retain people, with both interesting work, and an environment which has services and facilities to make people want to stay.

The same is starting to happen in the industrial sector with the “Integrated Operational Center”, bringing operators and experts into environments that and better for families, and working, as well as enhancing  collaboration, increasing agility. As we go through the next 5 to 10 years in the transition from “Baby boomer” and Gen X to Gen Y, the learning of a role, situation must be different. It must enable:

·         Self-Education

·         The ability to Ask and learn, this means knowledge systems at the finger tips no matter what device, location, or situation.

·          To learn on the job, “Youtubes” and knowledge embedded into operational experience

·         The ability to access experience through collaboration with experts no matter where they.

As stated in earlier blogs; this must become a part of the design of Operational, process, maintenance and operational management experiences. Not an afterthought, but just a natural configuration as people do today with alarms, they should configure knowledge access. If you are sitting designing operational experiences at the moment, sit back and allow yourself time to understand how you will add the learning experience so that the user will be able to become experienced and capable in an efficient time.

The two countries I am seeing this change most pronounced are China and South Africa, as they both have an educated Gen Y coming through more rapidly than in most countries to fill a void of Baby boomer and Gen X. The demand for a new generation of experience will grow, and Advanced Process Graphics will help, but experience must be embedded.