Ten ideas to…

In the first of a series of short, practical articles on PSL skills and personal development practices, Hélène Russell presents ten ways in which to measure success in know-how work

I was inspired to write this series of short articles when I was facilitating a workshop on professional support lawyer (PSL) skills and challenges at Knowledge Network West last month. It was a privilege to see PSLs from various firms sharing their ideas, tips and techniques freely, in order to help to improve each others’ practice. Obviously not all the ideas were innovative and not all would work with different teams or in every practice area, but the PSLs at the workshop found it inspiring to spend some time exploring them. Hopefully you will, too.

The aim of this series is to give you ten practical ideas on a range of topics, out of which you will probably find two or three which are suitable for you to try out, or which will inspire you with some new ideas of your own. If some of these tips have worked well for you or triggered your own solutions, why not share your experiences at the Knowledge Network West discussion board, or join the discussion at the LinkedIn group, PSL UK.

Measuring success remains one of the topics at the forefront of PSLs’ minds: how to prove their value to the firm; how to improve their visibility; and how to demonstrate the effectiveness of their latest KM project.

This article aims to provide some simple and practical ideas on the topic of measurement. The first two are basic fundamentals, which should be kept in mind when considering any system of measurement. The following eight are ideas for measuring different outcomes, out of which at least two or three should be suitable for you to try out. Even if none of these solutions are right for you, hopefully they will help inspire you to come up with some new ideas of your own.

Fundamentals
One: Think about the purpose of measurement
Before you measure anything, spend some time thinking about the purpose of measurement. What you are trying to achieve and what you are going to do with the results. You can measure activities (numbers of KM documents in a database, number of times a document is read) or business outcomes (improved customer satisfaction, increased profitability). Concentrate on business outcomes where possible. There is no point concentrating on ‘increasing engagement with KM systems’ unless increased engagement supports your firm’s business goals (for example, improves profitability or staff turnover) Also, if your web stats suggest that readership of your online knowledge packs is low, what are you going to do? Are you going to rethink the whole idea, improve the content or improve understanding of their value as they exist at present? Having a clear purpose helps you choose the right method of measurement for those aspects of your work which you can improve, and avoid wasting time on measuring aspects of your work which you can’t affect.

Two: Remember that ‘you get what you measure’
When your measurements concentrate on activities rather than business outcomes, your forms of measurement will affect what you are measuring. This isn’t a reason not to measure anything, but the more you standardise and publicise your systems of measurement and the more you link employees’ career success to that measurement, the more you will encourage your employees to ‘improve results’, rather than improve how knowledge is shared within your firm and support your firm’s business strategy. For this reason you may want to change and adapt your measurement systems over time, break the link between measurement systems and appraisals/career progression and mix up your measurement methods.

Practical measurement tips
Three: Keep a track of quantitative measures
It is cheap and easy to measure some basic web-based statistics related to your intranet pages. You can measure numbers of visitors to particular pages, numbers of click-throughs from e-mails or tweets and various webs stats, such as length of stay of visitors or numbers of new visitors – all of which can give you valuable information about how your intranet or web pages are being used. There are plenty of free programmes available such as Google Analytics, statcounter.com etc. Your IT department should be able to find you something suitable. You should then be able to show an improvement in figures following changes. For example: more visitors who stay longer on some pages (which demonstrates engagement); more visitors who stay only a short time on other pages (which shows that they’ve found single items of information quickly and efficiently); more readers of your current awareness pages; and more sharing on blogs and wikis.

Four: Measure numbers of contributions by fee earners
PSLs can provide details of numbers and quality of contributions by fee earners. This helps to show how engaged the fee earners are with the knowledge system and improves content levels. With judicious pruning by PSLs, it also improves quality as the better quality content gradually takes over.

Five: Involve other departments
Don’t forget that other departments can give you relevant information. Can you measure the numbers and types of research requests to your library and information services or trainees? How many requests for further reading are there as a response to your current awareness summaries? How have requests for basic research reduced following your new intranet pages or knowledge packs? Has your firm had fewer potential professional indemnity claims reported to it? Has readership of your client e-newsletter improved? Has your training or IT department had fewer requests for support or training on your precedent system or intranet?

Six: Consider time-recording for PSLs
Many PSLs aren’t expected to record any time. Even so, they should be encouraged to record all time spent on research on a chargeable file, even if this is written off later. You may also consider introducing (if you haven’t already) some non-chargeable codes, so the firm can see how each PSL’s day is divided. This has the added benefit that heads of department can assess how the PSL is utilised and consider what is the most effective use of their time. For example, can research tasks be passed to trainees to free up the PSL’s time for precedents or work on the intranet?

Seven: Try a survey
There are lots of different kinds of surveys, both quantitative and qualitative, many of which are free and easy to set up and analyse. Try SharePoint surveys, free web-based surveys, such as SurveyMonkey, or simple voting by e-mail. The primary issue in developing a survey is to be clear about what you are attempting to measure and choose the appropriate method.

Eight: Try old-fashioned paper surveys
Return rates for electronic surveys are often low, so if you need a high rate of return consider using a paper-based survey or combined electronic and paper one. Somehow, fee earners seem to be prepared to stop and complete a paper survey when it arrives in their post, or when they take a break from their computers. Paper surveys are not as quick or easy to analyse, but if you need a high return rate, they may be the best format.

Nine: Improve PSL article writing visibility
Often PSLs will write articles in the name of fee earners for publication. Improve PSLs’ visibility by giving them co-author status or by circulating a summary of articles in-house with the actual author. Summarise articles in training or team meetings. It is important that work is not duplicated and fee earners know who is an expert in which topics, so such bulletins do add value.

Ten: Keep people informed of KM successes
Circulate a department-wide summary of PSL work; circulate a summary of KM work across the firm, have a KM summary at board level; and have an in-house seminar on your key KM projects. But again, these bulletins must add value in some way, or they will simply be an irritation. See my previous article ‘Building a buzz’ for more ideas on keeping people informed of KM successes.

Not all these ideas will work for all teams or all specialisms, but hopefully you will have found one or two ideas you could use to improve the measurement of your successes or thought of a couple of new ideas of your own.

Hélène Russell of The Knowledge Business provides training and consultancy in KM to the professional services sector. She is also Founder of Knowledge Network West, the knowledge-sharing and networking group for KM professionals in the West. Contact her on 07548 912 779 or visit www.theknowledgebusiness.co.uk.