Revisiting the why (the vision)

Last week I spent two days in supervisor training. One key point that was stressed is to clearly define expectations, an action plan around those expectations, and revisit these expectations and actions at a set frequency.

I immediately start thinking how this relate to knowledge management (KM) and in particular our content management system (CMS) implementation. In developing our CMS we spent a ton of time working with management and users to define the business need, define the vision, set the expectations and develop the implementation plan. Since that time we've implemented the system and done a lot of training. However, we haven't revisited the vision or more importantly all the cool applications that will be available shortly (i.e. the value to the users). In being wrapped up in the doing, it's easy to lose sight of the why.

The take home message is after launching a great idea (or possibly a mediocre idea) don't forget to go back periodically and revisit why the idea was launched in the first place. Do this not only for management, but also for folks doing the work.