The knowledge to move mountains

Turning past experience into a source of knowledge from which current employees can draw. By Richard Wallace and Christine Holiday

Imagine: you are standing in the desert after the successful completion of the most intense combat operations in recent history. The combat troops are leaving as quickly as the transportation is available to take them home. Departing soldiers, trucks and combat vehicles leave behind mountains of unused ammunition. You are charged with the responsibility of categorising, packaging and shipping this ammunition.

This is exactly the situation in which the Defense Ammunition Center (DAC) found itself in 1991. Combat operations were over; allied countries were anxious to return to a state of normalcy and troops were more than ready to be sent home. The DAC, located in Oklahoma, US, had to oversee the movement of literally mountains of ammunition back to depots around the world. This huge undertaking would last for many months and have repercussions in terms of money, time and workload that, in some cases, lasted for years.

But the story doesn’t end there. Roll forwards in time to 2003, and some of the same people who were standing in the desert in 1991 found themselves in a very similar situation, in a similar location, faced with similar problems, but with one notable exception. The DAC had begun the implementation of knowledge management within its operations. A small cadre of people, the DAC’s own KM team, quickly saw the opportunity for, and necessity of, capturing what had been learnt in the first Gulf War, applying those lessons to current ammunition operations, and leveraging the new knowledge that was emerging from ongoing operations into the growing process of ammunition reset.

The DAC knowledge managers had heard about KM activities underway at the US Army Communications and Electronic Command (CECOM). The CECOM approach, which focused on accelerating the transfer and use of existing know-how, had allure because it addressed the needs of the DAC in a number of ways.

First, the approach focused on accelerating the transfer and use of existing know-how. In the case of the DAC, some of the personnel from the first Gulf War were still available, but geographically dispersed. The challenge was to assess what had been embedded from their experience and how it was working. The intent wasn’t to repeat the mistakes of the past, but there was no systematic way to work out what was embedded from previous experience, and what was being learnt and applied today.

The environment after Operation Iraqi Freedom was also significantly different and decidedly more dangerous than the environment after Desert Storm. While large-unit combat had ceased, there was a growing tide of insurgency that made doing the simplest of tasks difficult. DAC personnel and ammunition operations had to be able to learn, decide and adapt in order to respond quickly to unforeseen mission requirements. At the same time, they wanted to apply what they had learnt from the Desert Storm experience. Figuring out what was still relevant and what needed to change was a huge challenge. The long-term focus of CECOM’s approach was to access and build on experience and ideas to fuel innovation predicated on new and emerging challenges in the field.

The DAC, like many organisations, recognised a need to be able to predict the path of its future development, and therefore needed to ensure that what the organisation was learning was helping it to stay viable and relevant.

The strategy

From the beginning, the DAC KM team was savvy enough to establish the broad outline of a strategy to bring knowledge management into the organisation’s operations. Rather than trying to engineer a big bang, or to try to address the entire enterprise at once, it adopted an incremental approach based on five principles that allowed for near-term success, while simultaneously building the internal capacity to deliver results.

Recognise and build on what’s already making a difference – The DAC already had a team deployed to the Middle East to assess the current state of ammunition affairs and had already thought about how to bring the lessons from the first Gulf War into play in current operations. The question was how to institutionalise the process and make it a way of doing business, rather than relying on the insight and experience of a few well placed employees. Historically, the organisation had produced lessons-learnt documentation, but there was no way of knowing if the lessons had actually been taken on board. The DAC KM team wanted to institutionalise the application and re-use of knowledge as a way of doing business.

The best way to ensure organisation-wide buy-in to knowledge-sharing activities is by embedding learning into everyday business processes. A simple structure of learning before, during and after team activities provides a straightforward approach that is simple to design and execute. Consequently, the initial activity that the DAC KM team tackled was harvesting the learning derived from the first DAC assessment team that had been deployed to the Middle East. Rather than let the team members drift back into their everyday roles, the DAC organised a facilitated session focused on what they had learnt that could benefit the entire organisation, and what advice they would give to others that were about to be deployed.

In addition, the KM team used the individuals that had deployed on the assessment team as an ongoing source of reference. Some of the participants had also been deployed during the first Gulf War, so they were able to compare developments since then and see whether the lessons learnt from that conflict had really been learnt or, as is the case in many activities, if the lessons were merely documented and put aside. By interviewing other participants as well, the DAC knowledge-management team started to build a tapestry of areas that could result in performance improvements if critical, relevant knowledge were captured and applied.

The interview process was structured around determining knowledge that would be useful to others, actionable and specific. General observations or wide-ranging discussions provided little value. The DAC team focused on discovering the specific, actionable secrets of success, as well as what was being learnt from a practitioner’s point of view.

Each interview session began with an insight as to what the team needed to learn. The conversations with the interviewees revolved around speculating on the future while reflecting on the past.

In short, the team was looking for knowledge that was based on practical experience in the field, not just general ruminations about how things could be done better. The KM team then reflected on the conversations and distilled the highlights. From this point, a more complete understanding of what really needed to be learnt by current employees began to emerge.

It is important to note that the focus of the DAC’s efforts was the re-use of knowledge to increase performance. Consequently, the capture process could not become a goal unto itself and hijack the broader project.

To avoid this, the KM team undertook periodic ‘action reviews’ that assessed progress, embedded lessons learnt within the team and focused on what needed to be done next.

Apply a proven KM approach – The KM methodology that was adopted by the DAC team was one the US Army’s Communications and Electronic Command had successfully implemented. Adopting and adapting a proven methodology mitigated the inherent risk in applying a new strategy and provided a pool of resources that had ‘been there, done that’, which could be leveraged if there were trouble spots. Although grounded in KM theory, the CECOM approach was not predicated on theory. The goal was to deliver a practical way to find critical, relevant knowledge, and get it into the hands of the workers that needed it the most. The end result was performance improvement and a justification of the time and effort being spent on the project.

The DAC already knew the ramifications of the way ammunition was handled after the first Gulf War.

It also had the knowledge that the commanding general of the US Army Material Command – the command with the overall responsibility for the effort – wanted to ensure that the lessons from the first campaign were embedded. Mike Stankosky, director of the knowledge-management programme at George Washington University, fondly talks about KM either being a “sideshow” or the “main event”. The implication is that if KM is a side show, you will not be able to get the resources or the traction necessary to be successful in the long term. The commanding general’s support helped to reinforce the idea that the DAC had found its main event.

Learn and increase performance through focused projects – Instead of trying to apply KM to every aspect of the DAC’s operations, the KM team used a set of proven criteria to assess where they could have the greatest near-term impact. The criteria were:

Mission impact – Where can we show value and capture the attention of the organisation and the workforce?
Advocacy – Is there a champion in the organisation that will help with the bumps in the road that will occur with any project, and does that champion have the authority to commit resources to execution?
Transferability and reach – Does the project apply to a larger organisational context so that when the initiative begins to gain momentum, you will be able to replicate your success?
Feasibility – Is it a realistic project, one that is neither too simple nor too complex?
Alignment with organisational goals – Does the project align with what the organisation is trying to achieve through its strategic plan?

After senior leadership went through a process of discovery on how and why to apply knowledge to the various components of the ammunition-reset mission, a clear picture emerged of where the application of knowledge could make a difference and how the KM team could engage the organisation. As in the army itself, the KM team picked its battles and allocated its resources to ensure maximum impact.

Build competency while adding value – The DAC KM team was not sufficiently staffed to execute the entire project by itself. The team members realised that to have the most profound impact on the organisation, they would need to work to embed KM-based competencies in the organisation itself, so that KM became a way of doing business and not just another task for employees to address during their already busy workdays. The idea was to engage personnel that were going to have longevity in the organisation and had the interest and desire to learn and apply learning on the job to begin the process of competency building. Through a combination of training in such areas as individual and group knowledge capture, as well as the application of these skills on the job, the KM team was able to rapidly expand its footprint in the various functional areas of the organisation, at the same time as growing a capability that could be leveraged from one end of the business to the other.

In addition, the KM project helped to open horizontal communication channels within the DAC. The KM team intentionally pulled personnel resources from each of the directorates to ensure clarity and widespread buy-in to what was going on, and to further leverage the knowledge that existed within the organisation.

Prepare for success – The KM team laid the groundwork for success: it identified champions in the chain of command, found a ‘main event’ to address, and started to develop the internal competency to apply KM to ammunition operations. The final step was to identify how the team was going to get the most from the processes that were being put in place. One of the critical near-term needs of the organisation was to build a knowledge repository that would be accessible to every ammunition professional, 24/7. In constructing the repository and capturing knowledge, the team had to focus on facilitating knowledge re-use – if knowledge was inaccessible or irrelevant, the repository would be useless.

As well as ensuring that the knowledge that was captured was based on real experience and, where possible, linked to the original source, the KM team checked to ensure it would be relevant to others besides the person who had contributed it. The simple ‘so what?’ test is a powerful means of filtering content before it is added to the repository. If the answer is compelling, then the knowledge has value. This process kept the repository vibrant, relevant and avoided the problem of the repository becoming just another place to store meaningless information.

The results

The net result for the DAC was a significant increase in performance around ammunition retrograde operations. Perhaps the most visible result was the dynamic knowledge repository, called the Ammunition Reset Knowledge Asset, which now resides on the US Army’s technological backbone – Army Knowledge Online – so knowledge can be accessed in real time by any ammunition professional. The lessons presented are not just focused on Iraq, but anywhere in the world the US Army has been deployed and has ammunition experience – from Bosnia to Afghanistan.

The bulk of the team’s effort focused on populating four main areas: observations and insights on current operations; lessons learnt and applied; lessons to be learnt; and, contacts. This construct allows the user to go quickly to the area of most interest and identify what is most relevant to the task in hand.

The ‘observations’ section contains information around practical experiences so the reader is able to put what has been learnt in context. For example, ammunition personnel are deployed in varying areas of a theatre of conflict, each of which has different demands. By parsing the distilled knowledge around practical experience, users are able compare and contrast what they know of the area in which they will be deployed with information in the observations section. The intention is that as much practical experience in the context of real work as possible is transferred.

Similarly, and as an example of the value of insights recorded in this section, the DAC was able to develop a solution to equipment problems with deploying personnel. In some cases, navigation around the desert was relegated to dead reckoning – for example, drive for 30 minutes in a specific direction and, after those 30 minutes are up, you should end up where you need to be. There were obvious flaws in this approach, but by adding a simple, off-the-shelf GPS receiver to the deploying members’ toolkit, such difficulties were overcome.

The ‘lessons learnt and applied’ area is a rich source of best practices. Since the operational environment is always changing, it is critical to capture the context around past experiences and how this impacts upon ammunition operations. A major lesson learnt from Desert Shield and Desert Storm was the need to switch to shipping ammunition in containers, rather than break bulk. The DAC captured how the change immediately improved operations.

One of the novel ideas that the DAC team has incorporated into the knowledge repository is the idea of a ‘lessons to be learnt’ section. This is an area in which the team captures issues and ideas that may be outside the initial purview of the knowledge they are trying to capture, but is nevertheless too important not to record. One of the team’s initial insights was the growing problem of establishing the amount and location of captured enemy ammunition. While this was outside the main remit of the reset operation, it was beginning to loom large as an issue that the DAC would eventually have to address. The identification of this problem provided the basis for the corps of engineers to be become involved in a major programme dealing with captured enemy-ammunition stocks.

Finally, the KM team understood the importance of connecting people and thus enhancing the organisation’s ability to transfer the tacit knowledge contained in the experience of a distributed workforce. For every individual represented in the knowledge repository, there is a mechanism that allows a user to contact them and discuss relevant issues or questions. Because the contact information is connected to individuals, users have to hand contextual information about what was learnt, thus further enhancing its value.

The DAC team’s initial effort lasted six months. In that time, it was able to find, harvest and represent knowledge in new and innovative ways for the ammunition community, and leverage an ongoing investment by the US Army in knowledge management. The team has since found other ways to apply its skills, as it continues to promulgate the ability of the DAC to leverage the ‘know what’ and ‘know how’ of the organisation.

Richard Wallace is head of SAIC’s Knowledge Management Practice. He can be contacted at richard.b.wallace@saic.com.

Christine Holiday works in the Ammunition Knowledge Management Division for the Defense Ammunition Center.

The mission of the Defense Ammunition Center is to provide all US military services timely ammunition training, demil technology, explosives safety, engineering, career management and technical assistance through logistics support. Located in McAlester, Oklahoma, the DAC is a multi-faceted, interdependent organisation of just over 200 employees.

The DAC became acquainted with SAIC via a project SAIC was undertaking on behalf of the Army CECOM (communications and electronic command). The DAC subsequently engaged SAIC to help with the ammunition-reset operations the DAC had been tasked with improving.

For more information go to www.dac.army.mil/mission.html.