We are delighted to present the second of Steve Perry’s posts outlining his experience of rolling out social tools at a major international law firm (Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer).
Steve Perry is a partner in Headshift’s project delivery network and as a guest author on our blog.
Steve was a client of Headshift at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, and whilst there implemented the Confluence enterprise wiki to replace the existing intranet, and his first post covered some high level points about the rollout of social tools at Freshfields and he goes into more detail here:
 
Following on from my previous blog here are 3 further lessons learnt from the implementation of the Confluence enterprise wiki and the adoption of social business tools at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer (international law firm). In my 3rd blog in a few weeks time I will complete the series and set out the final ones
- Focus on usability and a user centric design – it is important to spend a considerable amount of time on ensuring the wiki is compelling, interesting and focused on the way users want to work. You should not base the designs and layout just on the views of your in-house UI experts (if you have any) but you should invest in independent expert advise (it doesn’t cost much) to guide you and explain what other organisations are doing and what is right for your organisation. The outlay will more than pay for itself in increased usage and user satisfaction. You should also supplement this with regularly asking your users what works for them and what doesn’t.
- Continue to work on the culture and people aspects – most professional services firms have a knowledge sharing culture as it’s the way they have developed and grown over the years but it still need nurturing and developing. Where knowledge sharing is not the norm you will need to do as much as you can to get it ingrained into the way the organisation operates. There are many ways to do this, these are just three:
- get senior management to include collaboration and knowledge sharing in the mission, objectives and goals of the organisation and to actively discuss the importance of it at every opportunity. This should be backed up by them demonstrating that they are doing it!
- make sure people are rewarded for collaborating and sharing knowledge. This should be via acknowledgement and recognition and it helps to have some stories of how people in the organisation have added real value
- embedding collaboration and knowledge sharing into the key business processes and the way people work so that individuals do it on a daily basis gaining benefit for themselves and in turn it becomes a by product for the organisation
- Take a lightweight, flexible approach to your social business implementation – I don’t think a big bang approach works and think that it’s better to take incremental steps along a strategic path picking off quick wins and building a groundswell of positive feedback and opinion. We did this at Freshfields and found there was a tipping point where everyone, at all levels, agreed the wiki was a good thing and we were asked to accelerate the roll-out. We then had demand outstripping supply but this was a good thing
