UAE Governmnet KM “Musharaka – Excellence through Knowledge”
(2009-2011) PROJECT MANAGER AND FOUNDING KNOWLEDGE MANAGER Department of Municipal Affairs (DMA), Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
As a project manager, I led the Knowledge Management Project – first of its kind in UAE and the Middle East – “Musharaka – Excellence through Knowledge” and managed successfully to ensure the performance/progress of the project is above the target in the first quarter of 2011. Moreover, the project was rated Excellent by the Abu Dhabi Award for Excellence in Government Performance and thoroughly reviewed by Abu Dhabi Award for Excellence Office and presented before the General Secretariat of the Executive Council as a model for the entire UAE KM projects.
Musharaka aims to enable employees to acquire and share information and international best practices, create creative and up to date methods for communication, exchange of knowledge and experiences, promote their functional performance, increase their productivity and enhance their provided services. Therefore, enable employees to improve the quality and efficiency of services provided to residents. In what follows, I outline briefly my key roles and responsibilities in the KM Project as well as achievements and other responsibilities regarding the rectification of all unresolved issues with various contractors and stakeholders. My role involves various managerial and operational tasks:
- Follow up on the improvement suggestions to ensure implementation and/or feed back to the employees/ contributors.
- Ensure success is celebrated and contributors are rewarded.
- Have an input in the formation of the employee’s training plan.
- Promote a culture of continuous improvement in the Municipal system.
- Identify new initiatives/change requests based on feedback, KPI Performance and Strategic KM Planning.
- Clearly define scope and benefits.
- Ensure resources and processes can support initiatives/changes.
- Measure the success through KPIs, Lessons Learned, Feedback surveys and general feedback captured during meetings.
- Provide regular status updates on progress.
- Implement improvements e.g. new Quick Wins, updated processes.
- Achieve excellence through knowledge by improving knowledge sharing practices
- Communicate improvement successes to various municipalities in Abu Dhabi.
- Identify improvements based on measurements.
- Create action plan for implementation.
- Managing the collection and organization of data information in order to capture, securely store, and appropriately disseminate the knowledge relevant to the initiatives and practices of DMA and Municipalities. More than 9000 valid knowledge documents have been uploaded and shared across the system.
- Organise of 4 major conferences on KM attended by more than 1000 employees from the Department of Municipal Affairs (DMA) and other government entities.
- Musharaka was the only case study selected by the United Nations from UAE to be presented3 in the UN World Conference on ICTs & Development, Abu Dhabi, 5th December 2010.
- Musharaka was selected as one of the top five case studies in terms of change management in the world4 by the Association of Change Management Professionals, United States, 2010.
- More than 75 awareness sessions about KM and Change Management attended by more than 2000 staff and students.
- Eleven KM seminars attended by more than 2500 staff from DMA, students from university as well as almost 40 entities (public and private) from across UAE. Speakers in these seminars included international experts and policy makers such as: Prof. Niclas Adler, Dean, Jönköping International Business School (JIBS), Sweden; Dr Najeeb Al-Shorbaji, Director, Knowledge Management and Sharing, World Health Organization, Switzerland; Prof. Venkat Ramaswamy, Professor of Marketing, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, USA; Prof. Aidan Berry, Dean, Brighton Business School, University of Brighton, UK; Dr. Ihab Tewfik, Chairman, International Forum for Public Health, University of Westminster, UK; Gary Cokins, Principal, Global Business Advisory Services, SAS, USA.
- Establishment of Communities of Practices (CoPs) across all sectors and disciplines. There are twenty CoPs established so far with a total of more than 500 members.
- Development and implementation of standardized knowledge management processes and procedures and ensure communities communications are created and sent to all staff each quarter.
- Ensure the publication process is clearly communicated to all staff and that the relevant access levels are in place for submitting and reviewing knowledge documents.
- Requirements gathering and design of all future KM initiatives.
- Coordinating and managing all new joiners training sessions.
- Encourage the knowledge sharing among employees in the Municipal System and students in universities.
- Establishment of performance measurements for evaluating Musharaka. Three Operational KPIs and three Processes recommended and agreed with the recently launched Business Process Reengineering (BPR) project.
- Ten quick wins projects completed successfully across all Abu Dhabi’s municipalities.