INSIGHT
succession planning
Knowledge Management
How Can Organizations Hang Onto Vital Knowledge That Retiring Workers Take With Them?

Terry Brueck President and CEO Mary Dailey-Fischer Principal Consultant

Quality leadership is going to be more important than ever for utilities over the next decade, as vast numbers of long-time employees leave for retirement. In the last issue of Communicator, we explored the ‘Learning Organization’ and discovered what it takes to become one. In this installment, we look at knowledge retention at the organization level. (See leading expert Carla O’Dell’s.)

How long does it take your organization to hire a replacement worker and get that employee to the point where he or she is as productive/competent as their predecessor? The answer is often measured in years, a reality that can kick-start the use of knowledge retention strategies. Another driver comes from the customer, who gets frustrated when the organization’s left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.

Major organizations in a variety of industries have successfully addressed the issues of knowledge retention by employing a systematic approach that begins with four questions:

• Who has the knowledge?
• What knowledge is being lost?
• What are the business consequences of losing knowledge?
• What can we do about each of them?

Break Down Barriers

There are often significant barriers to knowledge retention and reuse. For example, “tacit knowledge” is unknown to others, even to oneself. The challenge is to move this tacit knowledge to “explicit knowledge” so that it is known to oneself and others. As illustrated in Figure 1, knowledge may be explicit, evident, implicit, or tacit. All four can be affected by retirements. Understanding the four types of knowledge is vital to the development of effective knowledge retention strategies.

Figure 1: Understanding the four types of knowledge is vital to the development of effective knowledge retention strategies.

While staff turnover creates the need for knowledge transfer, utilities can be positioned to use turnover as a ‘retooling’ opportunity. The strategies, tools, and techniques used in other industries can now be adapted for use by drinking water utilities, the subject of an upcoming EMA-led AwwaRF research project.

Systems for evaluating worker skills, knowledge, and experience are vital to understanding the threat of lost knowledge. The competencies of a utility‘s workforce overlap with individual competencies – those personal traits and characteristics necessary for successfully applying that knowledge, skill, and experience. For example, an Operations Manager not only needs to grasp the technical operations, regulations, and safety requirements but also be able to manage people. This requires interpersonal competencies, such as empathy, tolerance, and understanding the motivators and needs of individuals.

Competencies are rarely identified yet essential for effective succession and transition. These innate attributes may not be transferable but identifying core competencies can help determine selection profiles and development needs. Few organizations have such an inventory of their skills/experience.

While technology plays an important role in knowledge management, what really counts is understanding what knowledge is worth archiving and how best to archive it. Much practical knowledge cannot be readily captured in a computer system. It is the combination of new technology with organization and practice changes that will lead to successful knowledge management in your organization.

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FORESIGHT
first of a two-part series
Wastewater System Optimization
Thanks To Advances In Technology, Wastewater Collection System Operators No Longer Have To Go With The

Dr. Bob Hill, P.E. Principal Consultant

Wastewater collection and treatment systems are a prized piece of urban infrastructure that usually represent greater asset value than any customer could imagine. The purpose of the system is simply to collect wastewater at points of drainage and convey it to plants for treatment, discharge, and disposal. Actually operating the collection system, in concert with treatment facilities, is the difficult part.

Diurnal variations in flow are a reality for most collection systems, with large increases during wet weather due to inflow and infiltration (I&I) and additional storm flows. For combined systems, excessive flows can contribute to degraded wastewater treatment performance, damaged equipment, in-system flooding, and sewer overflows. Can combined sewer overflows (CSO) be controlled and prevented?

An Expanded, Comprehensive View

When the capacity of fixed components is exceeded on the local level, not even automatic control will stop overflows. However, with a system-wide view of capacity – both used and available – overflow prevention is possible. Some people call this real-time control. In fact, any feedback control loop (even an automatic control at a pump station) is real-time control. System-wide control looks at the entire collection system together, so that flows throughout the system can be balanced, evening out peaks and valleys and preventing overflows.

In most combined sewer systems, the majority of overflows result from mismatched capacities in various sections of the sewers. It can be prohibitively expensive to expand collection, pumping, and treatment capacity. Adding control elements – lift station pumps, inflatable dams, gates, and weirs – is a less costly solution.

By employing system-wide control – optimization of the collection system by using the capacity available to balance ‘supply’ vs. ‘demand’ – individual capacities can be optimally matched, minimizing overflows and maximizing other benefits.

The use of optimal control for collection systems is growing but U.S. examples are still rare. “EMA came in and developed a control system that worked in a more coordinated fashion,” said John Nye, Data Systems Manager with the Lima, OH Department of Utilities, where system-wide control has been in place for 25 years. “We were holding our breath when we had the first big rain event, but it worked exactly like everyone had envisioned it would work.”

The purpose of system-wide control is to most effectively meet a set of goals that vary with time and circumstances. A dry weather (low flow) goal might be minimizing flow variations to the treatment plant. A wet weather (high flow) goal might be minimizing overflow volume. Other goals include avoiding excessive sedimentation in sewers, eliminating street/basement flooding, and better managing flows during collection system disturbances.

Traditional lift station controls work fine in under-loaded collection systems. At capacity, a system-wide view is much more effective. This expanded control philosophy requires the right instrumentation, control elements, local controllers, a communications infrastructure, and computer systems with specialized software. Strategies range in complexity from rule-based systems to sophisticated optimal control strategies using rainfall prediction and sewer models.

“There were really two keys to making it work,” Nye said. “First, we came up with a better model of the dynamics in the sewers when a big rain occurred. The other thing was the concept of control based on percentage full instead of elevation.”

A quick audit of a utility’s collection system facilities, along with operation and maintenance practices, can help determine the costs and potential benefits of system-wide control. It just might be better than ‘going with the flow.’

System-wide control utilizes specialized software to collect key information from a variety of sources throughout the collection system.

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Q & A INTERVIEW
Knowledge Management
Identify, Capture, Share, and Reuse Key Information

With half of today’s utility workers facing retirement in the next decade, Knowledge Management (KM) has become a significant issue for utilities across North America. Utility leaders need to understand how best to transfer knowledge within their organizations from retiring workers to their replacements. EMA spoke recently with one of the world’s foremost KM authorities – Carla O’Dell of APQC – on how utility managers can act now to prevent the loss of key knowledge in the years to come.

How do you define knowledge management and why is it important?

Knowledge Management has been around for 10 years or more. It has been called a number of different things but it is simply the systematic approaches that enable knowledge to be identified, captured, shared, and reused in the organization. Knowledge has always been a key competitive advantage. No matter how many assets you own, you’re not going to get value or profitability out of them if your people don’t know how to use them. What has made it even more critical – particularly for water and wastewater utilities in this decade – is the aging infrastructure and the aging workforce. If half of today’s utility workers are over the age of 44 and the average age of retirement is 56, that means a whole bunch of them are getting ready to retire. When they walk out the door, they leave with all kinds of knowledge about how to make that infrastructure work for customers and the utility. There is a tremendous amount of experiential knowledge that these people have about keeping that thing running and about its history that may or may not be documented.

The second knowledge issue is this: We know that as we hire new people there is what I call a ‘time to competency’ problem. How long is it going to take before those new people get up to speed? How do we enable them to have the knowledge of the organization faster than they will pick it up at the water cooler? A third reason that provokes organizations to take action is the fact that every organization is made up of functional areas, silos, departments and boundaries. Knowledge does not flow easily across those boundaries. What our customers say is, ‘The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.’

Is the situation in public sector organizations any different from what is going on in the private sector?

The issues are absolutely the same. The difference is that in some parts of the private sector they have been working on the solutions for a whole lot longer. That’s a good news-bad news story. The good news is that means utilities can really leapfrog quickly using world-class best practices and knowledge management. The bad news is they are behind.

What are the barriers to knowledge retention in a real-world setting?

There are really three barriers at the personal level. First, I maybe don’t know what I know and I definitely don’t know that you need to know it. That’s one barrier. The second barrier is one we all face and that is time. The time it takes to transfer what I know to you may be time that I don’t have. The third personal barrier to knowledge sharing is relationships. People learn from people they respect and people they know. If you don’t create a forum for people to get to know each other, you’ll have a hard time getting people to adopt or share practices. Let me give you an example of that. If I am a real technically-savvy maintenance person, I’m a little worried about giving a novice only two or three pieces of information. They may go out and act on it; but, because it’s not enough information, they could really screw things up. The organizational barrier is one of just not having structures and processes in place to identify and capture and share the knowledge. That’s where knowledge management approaches come in.

What role does technology play?

Technology plays a laggard role, not a leadership role. You need to establish the relationships, the communities, the networks, the habits of sharing, the agreements about what we’re going to share, and why it’s important. All of that has to be working first before you automate it. People will turn to a tool to make that easier once they are already doing it. They won’t start with the tool. At the same time, I don’t want to discount the importance of technology. When you are trying to capture large amounts of information, especially among people who are geographically dispersed, you really do need technology to support it; but you can waste a lot of money buying these things on the front end.

Assuming leaders make the commitment to Knowledge Management, what will it do for them long-term?

We have actually done a number of field studies on return on investment (ROI) in knowledge management and there are two ways to look at it. The major payoff comes from the transfer of best practices. If you have individuals, groups or locations that are really super at some particular process and another location is not, we know that the financial impact of closing the gaps between them is enormous. In fact, the median impact in seven of the organizations we studied was $15 million a year, and that’s just for one activity in one year. What’s interesting is the ROI in terms of cost per participant. If you have 100 people in a learning community within the organization, the average cost for that is about $150 per person per year, but the impact is $357 per person – double the investment! You don’t get that kind of ROI on most investments. If you focus your initial KM initiatives on the highest priority, tangible problems, you should expect to see payback the first year. For more intangible areas, like time to competency, ask what is it going to cost us in time lost when we can’t get a new hire up to competency quickly?

You have been a kind of champion in this field for more than a decade. What has changed in that time?

I think two major things have changed. Number one, it’s very, very clear that there are now robust methodologies – proven, scalable, repeatable methodologies – for knowledge retention and transfer. The second is the rate of adoption and the agreement among business leaders that this is a given has also changed. They don’t care what you call it. What they care about is that it’s focused on the business issues and results. There was a problem 10 years ago in that people got so excited about the idea of sharing and knowledge transfer that they thought that was the end in itself. A lot of good things happened; but if those networks are not focused on business needs, you don’t get the bottom line results.

What are the key steps to take now? Can organizations do this on their own?

There are really three key steps. Number one is to identify the knowledge loss and figure out where the greatest payoff would be. Number two is to use the very robust methods available for capturing that knowledge so that it will be retained by the organization. Third, there are also robust methods available for transferring it to other people. Organizations can try to do this on their own, but they are going to make a lot of mistakes, and they are going to be sorry. If you truly believe in the value of experiential knowledge, why not use someone who has done it before? Any mistakes you make should be new mistakes, not the old ones.

Dr. Carla O'Dell Dr. Carla O’Dell is president of APQC, formerly the American Productivity & Quality Center, which she joined in 1978. Her work on Knowledge Management dates to 1995 when APQC conducted the nation’s largest symposium on the subject. Since then, Dr. O’Dell has led a number of consortium studies with some of the world’s leading organizations. She works with APQC’s clients to design and implement knowledge management and best practice transfer initiatives. She has written a number of books on the subject and is a popular keynote speaker. Dr. O’Dell holds a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University, a master’s degree from the University of Oregon, and a Ph.D. in industrial and organization psychology from the University of Houston.

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CUSTOMER STORY
Seattle Public Utilities
Sleeping Soundly In Seattle
Seattle Public Utilities Has Made Security Everyone's Priority

With a high-profile water front (bottom left) and icons like the Pike Place Market (top left) and the Space Needle (bottom right), Seattle has long been considered a potential target for terrorism. Seattle Public Utilities (top right, center right, and center) has made security everyone’s business.

Like most Americans, Robin Friedman remembers exactly where he was when the news broke that terrorists had struck the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

Robin Friedman Project Coordinator of Security

“I was standing in the bakery at Madison Park, getting a donut,” the long-time Seattle Public Utilities employee recalled. “I was on my way to drop my son off at elementary school. As I drove into the office, I thought about how our utility, at that time, did not have a formalized security program.”

SPU was not alone in that regard. Until then, few water and wastewater utilities had given serious consideration to security issues. Instinctively, Friedman knew that was about to change. “I was the utility’s Emergency Preparedness Officer at the time so I was thinking about what are the appropriate actions for our staff, our resources, and our facilities? What are the important activities that need to occur to secure the operations of our facilities and provide our core services to the region?”

Friedman immediately urged his superiors to act quickly to address this new threat to Seattle’s water supply. Within four days, a Security Oversight Committee (SOC) was formed and steps taken to assemble teams, put protocols and systems in place, and begin training. Friedman was later named SPU’s Project Coordinator of Security, and the culture of the utility was forever altered.

“We pulled the team together very quickly and we pulled in the right people,” Friedman said. “It wasn’t about titular heads. We pulled in actual staff from Operations, the field, Human Resources, and Information Technology and we have met every two weeks since then.”

Assessing Vulnerability

Seattle Public Utilities has long been considered an innovator. The Utility provides water, wastewater, and solid waste services to nearly 1.3 million people in the Puget Sound region. Since 9-11, SPU has demonstrated a serious, comprehensive, proactive commitment to prepare for a wide range of potential threats. The Utility’s extensive planning process reflects that commitment as does the outcome – a comprehensive Security Master Plan incorporating stakeholder and consultant input, best practices, and the latest available technology. Seattle’s approach to security has merged the necessary physical, technological, and organizational features that must be integrated in practical ways if such a plan is going to work.

Scott Haskins SPU Director of Operations

“What has always been on the table is emergency preparedness and response,” said SPU Director of Operations Scott Haskins. “We have dealt with floods, with earthquakes, with water supply issues. But as far as security goes, it was not on our radar to the extent that it is now. Following 9-11, it became a high priority to this utility, to (SPU Director) Chuck Clarke, and to Mayor (Greg) Nickels that we be a well-protected city from potential terrorist acts. It became a priority to all of us that we assess what our vulnerabilities were, identify our critical assets, participate in the different assessment efforts, and use the best experts available. We became proactive from the very beginning.”

Seattle has grappled with security issues before. In 1999, protesters converged on the city for the World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings. Riots ensued and the unrest – along with Seattle’s response – made headlines around the world.

With icons such as the Space Needle, a major port and a foreign border nearby, the Emerald City has long been considered a prime terrorist target. That, and preparations for events such as WTO, the TOPOFF 2 full-scale Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) exercise, and major water/power outage tabletop exercises conducted in Seattle, has often prompted city leaders to ask, ‘what if?’

Following 9-11, SPU quickly commissioned multiple vulnerability assessments. Technologies were then tested before EMA was chosen to develop a master plan that would serve as a comprehensive guide to implementation. Now the many sleepless nights spent drafting plans and seeking answers are paying off.

Defining What Really Matters

Once the plan was in place, Haskins leaned on veteran project manager Frank McDonald to oversee the implementation phase. McDonald chose Jeff Williams as Program Manager for Phase One.

“My group has a past history of implementing interesting or unique projects,” said McDonald, who was actively involved in two major SPU treatment facility design-build-operate projects. “It was quickly realized that this project is pretty unique, with the design-install method that we’re using and also with implementing security improvements while we are still providing service. I was asked if we would get involved to take it to the next step, which is actually putting somebody out in the field installing things and coordinating it with existing operations.”

To implement the master plan, SPU embarked on a five-step program that ensures support capabilities are in place to guarantee success. Figure 1 depicts the strategy to align, assess, design, implement, and maintain an access control system and supporting capabilities.

Figure 1- SPU Security Program Framework for Deploying, Designing, and Implementing Security Solutions

The project’s ultimate goal was to develop an integrated security system with the capability to manage risk – a practical approach that can be massaged as capabilities and needs adjust. EMA assisted SPU in developing functional requirements for the security improvements. These functional requirements were then communicated in the RFP that was issued to potential design-installers. The design-install method offered much-needed flexibility. “I see design-install as an opportunity to get things moving along quickly, to get a designer in place and it just so happens that the designer is going to be the installer,” McDonald explained. “There is a lot more sharing of information, it’s a faster moving track, and the price is better.”

Improvements were designed to reduce risk from real threats and offer the capability to separate real from false. EMA helped the utility navigate the painstaking process of examining for protection 38 sites and 128 different assets in great detail. Each proposed feature was reviewed for consistent application. The list of features included:

• Card readers at sites/assets
• Lock controls at doors/gates/hatches
• Alarms on doors/gates/hatches/ladder guards
• Motion detection in critical zones
• Panic alarms & person down alarms
• CCTV with recorder at critical cones
• Intercom at entry locations

“The Master Control Plan highlighted certain critical vulnerabilities that we had within our utility that were unique to us,” Friedman explained. “It proved to be invaluable in focusing on what we would do versus what we could do. We were able to sift through and eliminate redundancies. When we looked at the $120 million plan versus the $12 million plan, we found that we didn’t need to do everything that was recommended in the vulnerability assessment to really protect an asset. If we had just launched a series of public works projects immediately after the assessments were done, we would have had a far less cohesive security program.”

The master plan now serves as a model for other City of Seattle departments, so that access control and security at all City facilities can be managed seamlessly. Long-term, it permits refinements while dramatically reducing maintenance costs. Once the first round of installations is complete, the utility will monitor performance and evaluate the effectiveness of every piece of hardware before proceeding. In addition, vulnerability assessments are scheduled every two years. The plan offers a base set of improvements to facilities, technologies, and the organization that will enable rapid and progressive improvements in the future.

SPU’s Information Technology staff provides ongoing assistance in determining where additional data and communications capacity is needed. IT helped expand the organization’s video assessment requirements by enlarging the capacity of its networks. This strong technical presence on the project team helped streamline the design and implementation process.

Measurables Are A Must

During the step-by-step development of SPU’s security program, a number of difficult issues surfaced, including cost, the temptation to install gimmicks or gadgets, internal realities, labor/management issues, and stakeholder considerations. Among the outcomes were significant challenges to SPU’s organizational norms.

In the past, the utility operated in an ‘open’ environment. Remote facilities were not off limits to the public. There were few security systems and procedures in place. Today, SPU is a deliberate, cautious, security-conscious organization that confronts the unknown with a sophisticated array of technology and training. Now utility personnel can quickly decide whether a perceived risk is credible and, if necessary, react quickly. It is EMA’s holistic approach to security planning, which incorporated organizational and process changes into the mix, that enables Haskins to sleep well, secure in the knowledge that the tools are in place to detect, deter, and mitigate threats to Seattle’s water supply.

“It definitely represents a culture change,” Haskins said of his soon-to-be ‘keyless’ organization. “One of the highest priorities for this utility is safety. What we’ve tried to do is apply the same kind of value to security. We have trained all city employees multiple times on security. Every supervisor in the department has received training. We have information on our website. We have developed 22 security policies and gone over those with the union and published them. We’re working with EMA currently to write the detailed procedures associated with those policies. We are writing those at the same time as we are implementing the improvements to facilities and software that goes with it so the procedures will work hand in hand with the implementation of our security improvements.”

“I think it starts at the top,” Haskins added. “The Mayor has said that he wants Seattle to be the best prepared city in the country, and that is a high challenge for us that we take seriously. With all that we have done, I think there is a far greater appreciation among our employees for the importance of security. We hear that from the public, too.”

Regardless of the unique geographic features or specific threats facing a particular utility, the key to establishing an effective security program is consistency, from planning through implementation.

Figure 2- SPU utilized the Security Capability Maturity Matrix to identify performance gaps in the organization’s ability to react to threats.

SPU employed the Security Capability Maturity Matrix (Figure 2) to clearly identify the performance gaps in the organization’s ability to react to threats (prior to security improvements) versus where that capability needs to be. SPU’s goal was to have each security feature meet a standard set of criteria, so that there was uniformity from one location to the next. At the same time, SPU wanted security to have minimal impact on day-to-day operations.

“You have to know what you are trying to do and to what degree you are trying to do it,” Friedman said. “You have to have a measurable – a standard by which you can measure how effective your security and emergency management programs are. Having our eight measurables for the gap analysis is extremely important.”

Simplicity is essential. End users have to be able to apply the technology intuitively in the field. The security monitoring center should be able to easily and reliably make good decisions. It’s a balancing act that requires multiple iterations and clear communication between users and designers.

Selecting the right vendors was another key component to meeting that standard. SPU worked with EMA and the City of Seattle to pre-qualify a select group of companies who were placed on a master contract for work yet to be defined. Vendors signed Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDA) to protect the City from release of secure information.

Ready To React And Respond

Since the terrorist attacks of 9-11 and the recent spate of natural disasters, utilities have taken significant steps to assess the status of their security preparedness and develop plans to reduce the risk. SPU has gone one step further by implementing the tools and capability to distinguish – in real time – false threats from actual threats and to take appropriate action immediately.

Seattle’s program developed and matured through the extensive design and implementation process. Rather than getting sidetracked by the latest technology or expensive window dressing, SPU stayed the course. Instead of security becoming just another silo with key information residing on the desks of one or two individuals, Seattle has made security everyone’s priority.

Most importantly, the Seattle approach provides for continuous improvement. Phase One progress can be measured and evaluated before Phase Two begins. It is a practical way of doing business that recognizes the realities of changing events, priorities, and technology. While some aspects of Phase Two are known, much remains to be determined.

“We want to be able to refine what we are physically going to do differently,” Friedman said. “I’d like to measure how effective some of this stuff is before I commit taxpayer money and water utility money to Phase Two.

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e-FLUENT
Managing Change
PinPint Resource Loading Tool Simplifies Difficult Decisions

Frank Godin Principal Consultant

When you sit down at the kitchen table to assemble a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, it helps to turn over all of the little pieces before you begin, grouping like pieces together so the puzzle begins to make sense. It’s the same with change management. When it’s time to optimize your workforce, you have to know what you’re
working with.

PinPoint is a unique, web-based tool. It was developed by EMA to help clients analyze and deploy human resources during a change initiative while maintaining service delivery excellence. Although resource loading software is not new, the magic of PinPoint is its simplicity. It is a straightforward, practical, cost-efficient way for plant managers and engineers to understand the work they have to do and the people they have to do it, even in large, complex organizations. The tool can help managers:

• Identify continuous improvement opportunities
• Design a more flexible workforce
• Track training for skills/tasks/positions
• Identify training needs when shifting tasks
• Track job changes and support job description audits
• Model the impact of organization change before executing it
• Develop a business case and evaluate return on investment (ROI) for technology projects
• Shift responsibilities in a reorganization
• Adjust work requirements for new equipment, process and/or control systems
• Add new facilities to the operations mix

PinPoint uses a simple format that makes it easy for plant managers and engineers to understand the work they have to do and the people they have to do it.

Paint A Picture Of Your Resources

PinPoint is designed to track, record, and drive a complex change management process. It provides quick and easy access to accurate labor and task data, enabling the organization to make better decisions and back them up with hard data. By analyzing the effect on every employee and task, managers can create multiple test scenarios before implementation. The result is a clear picture of the organization and how it uses its resources. It has five key components:

Perhaps the most important component is the Business Case Calculator, which is designed to identify prime optimization opportunities by calculating the break-even point and ROI. Quick wins can be identified and the potential outcome of any proposed change in organization structure, business practices, or technology quantified.

Change management is never easy but organizations that take advantage of this new tool can make better use of assets, reduce labor costs, save time, and more efficiently manage people and the work they do. By using the latest technology in the decision-making process, organizations can raise the use of best practices to a whole new level

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