What IS an Expertise Management Platform?
‘You’re only as good as your last project’ - so the saying goes.
In order to put your best foot forward on every project, and effectively build your company’s reputation over time, you need to be able to effectively manage your company’s collective expertise. After all, your expertise is what you are really selling and what gets you those projects in the first place.
How can you manage your company’s expertise though when you don’t have visibility into what your employees know, where your expertise lies and the company’s past experience?
Engineering and technical service providers struggle with this constantly. Do these sound familiar?
“Every time we start a new proposal, it feels like we’re starting from scratch”
“We do lessons learned sometimes, but to be honest we just throw them in a spreadsheet and never look at them again”
“I feel like we aren’t putting our best foot forward to our clients”
That’s where an Expertise Management Platform comes in. Expertise Management platforms help you maintain visibility into your employee’s individual expertise and knowledge, where that expertise is located across the company, and the company’s collective expertise and experience. And a good Expertise Management platform will help you actually leverage that expertise into tangible results that will directly impact the company’s bottom line.
Engineering service providers typically spend 5% of their gross revenue on proposal generation. Approximately half of this is in finding the right resources for the project team. For many companies, that can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Expertise Management platforms save you significant time and money by providing you with maximum visibility into the individual expertise that each employee within the organization has and where that employee is located so that organizations can efficiently and purposefully assign the correct employees to each project team.
Individual expertise refers to each employee’s knowledge and experience in different subject areas (also known as areas of expertise). Individual expertise is what an employee brings to their role via past experience and education. It grows as they advance in their career within the organization and take on new responsibilities and projects. Much of individual expertise is cultivated ‘on the job’ and best learned from others who have been in their shoes, so to speak. This is the power of mentorship and cross-training - and an effective Expertise Management platform will enable both. Furthermore, by having that visibility into each employee, they can see where an employee may be lacking in certain areas of expertise and work with them to round out their skill set. An Expertise Management system should enable an organization to capture, evaluate and track that employee’s growth if they need to. This is called an Expertise Inventory and should enable an organization to have maximum visibility into what their employees know, who their experts are and where they are located so that companies don’t have to waste money continually searching for this information.
All companies deal with employee turnover. Particularly as engineering projects come to a close, employees move on to other contracts and don’t always stay with the same company. When an employee leaves, they take their knowledge, skills and expertise with them. It is a loss to the organization. With your Expertise Management platform, you can capture each employee’s expertise - allowing current and future employees to be mentored and learn from past employees. It means a company doesn’t lose that valuable knowledge when an individual leaves. It means that the time and resources dedicated to training employees is never wasted, because that employee’s individual expertise is captured within the platform and continues to contribute to the company’s collective expertise. When you have the value of the experience of every employee the company has ever worked with, the company is that much stronger and more competitive because of it.
What if your best employee never left?
What is Collective Expertise? The collective expertise of an organization is the combination of the company’s past project experience, mistakes and learnings, as well as the sum total of each employee’s individual experience, knowledge and expertise that they bring to the organization. The ability to leverage value from collective expertise is what gives your company their competitive advantage, especially for engineering and technical service providers.
In order for a company to benefit from their collective expertise, they need to have a way to actually find relevant content when they need it. Most companies have some form of a Lessons Learned process. This might be stored in an internal database, a Lessons Learned software program, or simply an Excel sheet. The hard-learned lessons and expertise that a company gathers is their advantage but these lessons are often stored away and not used to their full potential to help a company make efficient, data-driven decisions when putting together proposals, teams, and projects. An effective Expertise Management platform enables a company to effectively gather this information, as well as intelligently mine this information for optimal results. Rather than having a member of the team spend precious hours to scroll through a database to find past projects that are similar to new ones they are bidding on, or call around to different offices to find out who the expert is in a certain area, an Expertise Management platform can intelligently find the relevant projects, people and learnings and deliver them on demand. This saves time and resources, yes - but it will ultimately help the company win more projects, stay on schedule and increase revenue.
If you’ve ever found yourself dealing with any of these problems, it might be a good time to consider an Expertise Management Platform for your own company. There’s an easier way to use your competitive advantage to its full advantage.
If you’re interested in how totaliQ has helped companies like yours revamp their Lessons Learned process, save time putting together proposals and win more projects, contact us here.