1.
Merced Group
Catherine Shinners
For Washington DC
Knowledge Management
Community
August 27, 2020
Power up your
“remote” working -
spend less time in
video meetings
Tips on digital tools,
modalities and practice

2.
Our conversation today
 Flow – how digital transformation should feel
 Stacks in the cloud – how it really feels
 Chronic malfunctions
 Bring your teams into the flow
 Reshape meetings
 Make sense of new distributed working
Merced Group
 Two case studies
 Tips for you and teams

3.
Brings web benefits within
SLATES, mobile, multimodal (video, voice, text), rich
experience, location
Pull not push
Subscribing, alerts, tagging, social graph
Contextuality
Immediacy of conversation - Resources, assets are in the flow.
Authentic leadership voices. Socializing knowledge – learning as
we go.
Behavior, capabilities, ethos
Transparency, networks of relationships, reciprocity, personal
knowledge curation
Empowered association
Communities of practice, knowledge networks,
crowdsourcing
Value Elements of the Digital Workplace
It’s all been there for a while, so
why does it seem so far away?
Merced Group

4.
Employee Comms
Platforms
Productivity
Email
Meeting
Solutions
Content
Collaboration
Workstream
Collaboration
Enterprise Social
Networks
Y-A-T Factor
Yet Another Tool Challenges
 New tools, more tools, cloud
tools
 IT project rollout focus, low or
missing business integration
 Poor or missing guidance,
governance
 Reliance on earlier modalities –
email, individual productivity tools
– missing digital opportunity
Merced GroupMerced Group

5.
Digital
Transformation
COVID-19
Workplace Shift
Merced Group

6.
Meeting
malfunction
 Complex workflows in email
 Cross-functional teams
 Fractured communication threads
 Project artifacts not in flow
 Versioning-quality control
 Continuous improvement hampered
by buried knowledge
 Pushed not pulled (dlist distraction)
Email driven workflows
and communications
 Misuse of high value F2F
meeting time
 Overscheduling
 Distracted multitasking
 Poor meetings norms
Merced Group

7.
1,050
Merced Group

8.
8
Network-
based group
cohesion &
connection
More agility &
knowledge
flows
Content
awareness &
accessibility
Transparent
conversational
flow of work
Digital team
A continuous flow
ME
ME
WE
WE
Transparent creation and co-
creation of content in the flow of
work leads to new conversations and
feedback loops
Content change triggers via streams,
alerts, filters, or tags improve
awareness & accessibility
Sharing updates , expanding connections
using social profiles, brings richer context
and stronger cohesion
Visibility of work expands
knowledge collections,
invites diversity of more
inputs

9.
GLOBAL DEAL ASSESSMENT AT
FORTUNE 500 TECH COMPANY
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Building a knowledge base around insight,
experience and understanding of the market
dynamics and successful deal structures.
9Merced Group

10.
SITUATION & CHALLENGE
Situation
❏ A global deal assessment group’s job is to ensure the technical quality of
service contracts for client organizations.
❏ Small group with team members in varied geographies. Each member
possesses unique domain knowledge about their regional market,
competitive intelligence and deal structures.
Challenge
❏ How to leverage group insight, experience, understanding of market
dynamics, and successful deal structures for group learning and onboarding
new team members
10Merced Group

11.
WHAT THE TEAM DID
❏ A team space in an enterprise social network environment - - members discussed
and reviewed challenges and opportunities in each market, and leveraged that
insight into regional deals.
❏ The use of social profiles - - A geographically dispersed team kept track of
growing experience and expertise of each other.
❏ A Q&A section - - important questions were answered transparently for the benefit
of the group while experts expanded on topics.
❏ A shared workspace - - competitive information and market intelligence artifacts
were placed in a common shared workspace.
❏ Alerts and notifications - - group tracked specific areas of content development
or change.
❏ Consistent tagging - - increase in searchability, identification of critical content,
observable discussion
11Merced Group

12.
RESULTS
❏ More access to tacit know-how,
enabled group to leverage all
insights, experiences
❏ Gained greater ‘in-context’
understanding of successful deal-
structuring
❏ New team members onboarded
more quickly
❏ More questions answered, deal
project information was
transparently available
12Merced Group

13.
RFP PROCESS
FORTUNE 500 TECH COMPANY
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Moving a complex RFP process out of
fragmented, narrow and above-the-flow
practices into open, in-the-flow processes.
13Merced Group

14.
An RFP response is a complex, cross-functional work process that involves:
❏ coordinating project manager
❏ technical domain specialists
❏ product specialists
The process required a quick response to multiple requests for proposals from
clients but their response was slowed by:
❏ A workflow driven by email
❏ Loss of context because of poor coordination
❏ Versioning confusion resulting in poor quality control
❏ Time wasted in status update meetings
❏ Tacit know how buried in emails (problem solving, repurposed knowledge)
14
SITUATION & CHALLENGE
❏ sales staff
❏ senior management
❏ finance staff
❏ legal staff
Merced Group

15.
WHAT THE TEAM LEARNED
❏ Shorter time to completion of RFPs
❏ Higher overall quality and accuracy
❏ Better continuous improvement through broader reuse of tacit know-how
❏ Increased visibility of team members leading to more cohesive response
❏ Collectively up-to-date through alerts, notifications
❏ Easier to track asset versions and contributions to the project
❏ Better visibility to conversations, around issues and problem-solving
15Merced Group

16.
Digital working tips
For teams
 Norm setting - At project start take set up
collaboration and tools and meeting norms.
 Tool selection - What tools should we use to
communicate and capture project activities?
 Content connectivity - How should we tag &
distribute content so it is consistently find-
able & people receive timely alerts for content
updates?
 Co-learning and tuning - Take time at
beginning of project work and an intervals to
make sure everyone is comfortable with tools
and using effectively
For yourself
 Content connectivity Your work product
includes connecting it find-able on a
network – tagging, link-ability, connecting to
social profiles
 Info Flow - Proactively manage flows of
information – bring elements like activity
streams, tagged content into your realm of
awareness (alerts), manage alert flow to
support concentration at other times
 Co-learning - Find a “tools buddy” – build
your own capability
Merced Group

17.
Reshape meetings
For teams
 Norm setting – Do we need to meet
regularly? Can conversational tools and
web-based status updates carry that work?
Does everyone need to be in every
meeting? Set times to allow for people to
transition into and out of meeting space.
 Razor sharp expectations - Clear agendas
published ahead of time, pre-meeting
expectations (review material) post
comments online
 Don’t call, but convene meetings – bring
attention & focus – threshold transition
especially for video meetings
For yourself
 Request norms - ask for meeting
artifacts for review ahead of
meetings and process for advance
status updates, shorter meeting
times
 Info Flow – Use digital tools to
post queries, requests for
clarification, comments in online
shared tools
 Boundaries – Establish/block
focused work time on calendar
Merced Group

18.
Move from emergency response
mindset to 21st century norm
Develop digital literacy towards
mastery
Broaden learning networks and
contexts
Rethink old practices
Digitize your work products
Mentor digital skills building up to
leadership and out to colleagues
Not remote working but Distributed Working
Merced Group

19.
CATHERINE
SHINNERS
In our networked world we’re
more connected to our
organizations, society,
environment - and each other.
Catherine brings her
background as a change
agent, communicator and
technologist to help people &
organizations build new
agilities and adaptations to
the way they network, learn,
lead and create value.
Merced Group
Founding
member
since 2013
Merced Group
SIKM Leaders - Global KM network
San Francisco Bay Area KM
Merced Group is a digital workplace, communications and change
management consultancy helping companies drive productivity
and create employee experience and engagement through digital
workplace design and practice, innovative communications
programs and scalable change management.
Networks
Associate - Digital
Workplace Group