"Reminder" meetings and how they work

Here is a new and interesting approach to cross-office knowledge sharing; the Reminder meetings.

delegates at KAConnect

Last week I was speaking at the excellent KAConnect conference in San Francisco – a meeting of people from the Architecture and Engineering industry, many of them users of the Synthesis Intranet technology . This was a new audience for me, and one where the companies were smaller, more scattered and with a younger demographic than most of my clients, so it was also a learning opportunity for me to see how KM could be applied in such a setting.

One interesting approach was described by Sarah Causey of Ratio Architects – an organisation of about 150 staff in 4 locations. They a typically young staff demographic (many of the firms at KAConnect had average staff ages in the 20s) so much knowledge sharing is focused on building the capability of the younger staff. Their main design tool is Revit, and as a way of spreading knowledge of how this tool is best used, Ratio hold weekly Revit Reminder meetings.

These meetings are held online, last only 15 minutes, and focus on a particular topic or a particular problem area, and how this is best addressed. Architects are driven by time-writing and by billing hours to clients, so these knowledge-sharing meetings are given their own charge code, and appear as a specific line item on time sheets.

The also hold similar Reminder meetings on QA/QC topics. The organisation has 12 QA advocates, and they take it in turns to host a weekly reminder meeting on specific quality topics or specific problems and how to solve them.

These meetings are so popular that Ratio finds up to a third of their staff attend the meetings.

This is a really good example of fit-for-purpose knowledge sharing across a small but dispersed organisation.