Preparing for Conversations with Stan Garfield

Stan Garfield leads the worldwide knowledge management programme for HP Services Consulting & Integration.

This article on Knowledge Management at HPexplains the Engagement KM initiative and talks about the Solution Opportunity Approval & Reviews (SOAR) process used in bid engagement.

The most successful of the processes is the HP Customer Engagement Road Map which is not just a KM tool but the tool everyone must use during a client engagement from opportunity creation to delivery. It is the process, the way people work. It is the basis of the Engagement Knowledge Map found on the HP Knowledge Network homepage which is a kind of portal through which people work. The Knowledge Network is a collection of tools, processes and people based on knowledge HP and others have accumulated through experience and learning.

The Engagement Knowledge Map is a grid of steps and resources necessary to carry out a client engagement. Down the left side column are resources for documents, templates and source codes. It includes collaborative tacit and explicit resources-team spaces, HP market research, practice portals and communities, a project profile repository and knowledge briefs (white papers).

Across the top of the grid are five categories: opportunity creation, opportunity evaluation, development and bid, negotiate and close, and deliver.

"People do follow the roadmap because it is integrated into the process" Garfield says. It's up to someone during Solution Opportunity Approval & Reviews (SOAR) to ask, "What are you reusing in this bid?" If the answer is "none" then the question becomes "Why are you even bidding on this if you don't even know if we've ever done this before?"