Whether you're a boutique consultancy or a global professional services firm, ensuring your workforce has full visibility into your company's capabilities is essential. Employees who have a deep understanding of their colleagues, and their company's past project successes are better positioned to provide innovative solutions and deliver more impactful work.
In this blog, we’ll take a look at how Flowcase enables seamless knowledge sharing in the form of three use cases: identifying subject matter experts, referencing past projects, and facilitating employee onboarding.
Identifying subject matter experts
If you’re reading this you may already know how Flowcase helps firms identify their optimal project teams with its advanced search capabilities. However, these same search filters have an additional benefit; they can be incredibly useful for surfacing internal subject matter experts (SMEs) that you can tap into for learning and insights.
Let's say you're crafting a proposal for a cybersecurity proposal and want to integrate perspectives from someone with deep knowledge in that domain. A few keyword searches in Flowcase can reveal colleagues with cybersecurity backgrounds, such as relevant experiences, skills, and/or accreditations. These SMEs may be tied up on other projects, so may not be available for your project team, but they can still offer their expertise. You can loop them in for a quick chat to spar on ideas, get feedback on your proposed approach, or get verification on certain points.
Of course, leveraging your coworker’s knowledge can be just as valuable mid-project when your consultants inevitably encounter challenges. Say you're implementing a cloud migration and hit a snag with an unanticipated compatibility issue. A couple of clicks allows you to identify teammates who may have navigated similar hurdles before. Their input could mean the difference between getting stuck in the weeds for weeks or rapidly resolving the problem.
Referencing past projects for inspiration
While Flowcase houses a wealth of employee data, it's also a rich repository of your firm's projects. The detailed project information and case studies you host in your platform provide a valuable reference library to inform new initiatives and proposals.
For example, let's say you're embarking on an IT change management project to implement new SaaS tools across a client's enterprise. A quick search may uncover previous IT transformation projects that leveraged creative approaches like design thinking workshops, comprehensive training programs, or organizational mapping activities. Reviewing the background, methodologies, and final deliverables from those related projects could spark ideas to separate your proposal from the pack. You may even discover your firm has untapped experience in complementary areas like change management communications planning or technical integration opportunities.
The icing on the cake is that all projects are linked to the employees who worked on them. This means that you can dig deeper and find out the exact team members who were responsible for setting up those workshops, or for piecing together the proposal. You can then set up a quick call to pick their brains on what worked and what didn’t.
Facilitating employee onboarding
Of course, knowledge sharing need not be a reactive exercise. Rather, you should proactively educate your team about your team and past projects to give them an idea of your firm’s expertise and where they can turn to for guidance and inspiration. A prime opportunity for this is during employee onboarding.
New employees can easily navigate Flowcase to quickly ramp up on their new colleagues' backgrounds, areas of expertise, and career accomplishments. Likewise, they can dive into case studies across all of your firm's past projects. This exposure can give new starters much-needed context around the full scope of your offerings right out of the gate. Additionally, giving your team a database where they can search for projects that are most relevant and interesting for them is a much more effective way of learning, rather than simply providing them with a one-size-fits-all list of case studies.
Empowering your new starters from day one creates a more engaged, cross-trained, and confident workforce. With Flowcase they can easily identify mentors, uncover interests they weren't aware of, and generally gain the knowledge to start making impactful contributions faster.
In summary
Flowcase’s searchable database isn’t just about finding the best people and projects to submit with your proposals. Instead, it doubles up as an invaluable tool to facilitate knowledge sharing across your firm, helping your people to collaborate and share insights more effectively.
