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Performance Assessment, Roles, and Responsibilities

Technique 7.1: KCS Roles and the Licensing Model (Exam Only)

Core Idea of KCS Licensing

  • KCS uses a licensing model, not job titles
  • Licenses define:
    • Rights
    • Privileges
    • Responsibilities
  • Licenses are earned through demonstrated behavior
  • Licenses can be revoked for poor judgment

Licensing Metaphor (Understand, Not Memorize)

  • Like learning to drive:
    • Start with limited rights
    • Gain independence with experience
    • More rights = more responsibility
  • Classroom learning ≠ competence
  • Skills become natural through practice

KCS Roles (Big Picture)

  • Knowledge Workers – anyone responding to requests
  • Leaders – define vision, support standards and workflow
  • KCS Candidates
  • KCS Contributors
  • KCS Publishers
  • KCS Coaches
  • Knowledge Domain Experts (KDEs)

KCS Candidate

What a Candidate Can Do

  • Understand KCS basics
  • Use structured problem solving
  • Capture requestor context
  • Search and find articles
  • Link or flag articles
  • Modify their own articles
  • Create:
    • Work in Progress (WIP)
    • Not Validated articles

Key Limits

  • Cannot validate articles
  • Cannot publish externally
  • Must not use articles they do not understand

KCS Contributor

What a Contributor Can Do

  • Finish and validate articles
  • Ensure compliance with content standard
  • Create Validated articles
  • Improve Internal articles directly
  • Flag External articles for review
  • Decide when an article is "sufficient to solve"

Key Differences from Candidate

  • Higher confidence
  • Independent judgment
  • No Coach review required

KCS Publisher

What a Publisher Can Do

  • Set article audience to External
  • Modify externally visible content
  • Publish to web / partners / customers
  • Apply broader audience judgment
  • Understand:
    • External audience
    • Copyright
    • Trademark
    • Publishing risks

Exam Insight

  • Publisher ≠ editor
  • Publisher ≠ approver of everything
  • Publisher must protect customers

The KCS License

  • Licenses are:
    • Earned
    • Renewed
    • Revocable
  • Progression based on:
    • Consistent behavior
    • Demonstrated judgment
    • Exams (often)
    • Coach recommendation (often)
  • Not tied to:
    • Job title
    • Support tier
    • Seniority

Variations in Licensing (Exam Awareness)

All are valid:

  • Two-level model (Contributor + Publisher)
  • Combined roles
  • One-level model with revocation on poor behavior

Key idea: - Trust level determines model

KCS Coach (Very Exam Important)

Coach responsibilities include

  • Promote user skill development through effective skills coaching.
  • Help the KCS Candidate understand the problem solving workflow and how the KCS article management process is integrated with the thinking process.
  • Influence knowledge workers to practice good knowledge management.
  • Influence knowledge workers to apply standards for creating and improving knowledge within the knowledge base.
  • Review KCS articles framed by the KCS Candidate until they reach required levels of competency.
  • Perform internal validation of KCS articles to ensure accuracy for the described context and adherence to the quality standards set by the organizational unit.
  • Provide ongoing feedback to knowledge workers and management about organizational KCS skill development.
  • Provide feedback to the knowledge developing organization, within the defined processes, to improve KCS article management.
  • Develop and monitor their own coaching skills through work with head Coaches.
  • Participate in the KCS Council.

Role Purpose

  • Change agent
  • Skill developer
  • Reinforces correct behavior

Key Responsibilities

  • Coach Candidates → Contributors → Publishers
  • Review Candidate articles
  • Reinforce workflow and standards
  • Provide feedback to individuals and management
  • Participate in KCS Council

Important Exam Point

  • Coaches should be part-time
  • Full-time Coaches lose credibility

Knowledge Domain Expert (KDE)

Responsibilities include:

  • Ensure efficient and effective problem solving by the team.
  • Apply expertise in data mining to perform trend analysis and find the significant patterns in the data.
  • Assist in the fundamental development and maintenance of knowledge base quality and flow, including the knowledge base quality methodology, article standards, and process guidelines.
  • Perform Known vs. New Analysis
  • Develop and analyze reports on key metrics for business value of the knowledge base, such as article reuse rates, web-enabled call avoidance, and improvements to resolution times.
  • Ensure effective knowledge base operations by monitoring related information (organizational effectiveness, resource allocation, new article creation trends) and making recommendations to management to accommodate changing conditions.
  • Advocate for changes necessary to maintain the knowledge base as an effective tool for achieving business objectives.
  • Provide input for items that have a worldwide impact. For example, monitoring and defining the KCS article metadata, prioritizing enhancement requests, coordinating training efforts where feasible, and planning for upgrades and systems integration enhancements.
  • Influence the owners of products, documentation, processes, and policies to make improvements 
  • Participate in the KCS Council.

Role Purpose

  • Owns knowledge health for a domain
  • Drives Evolve Loop value

Core Responsibilities

  • Identify high-value content
  • Perform pattern and trend analysis
  • Reduce duplicates
  • Improve reuse (internal & external)
  • Drive:
    • Product improvements
    • Process improvements
    • Policy improvements
  • Perform:
    • Known vs New analysis
  • Participate in KCS Council

Knowledge Domains (Understand Concept)

  • Logical collections of articles
  • Based on:
    • Product family
    • Function
    • Technology
  • Domains:
    • Overlap
    • Are not rigid
  • Purpose:
    • Pattern analysis
    • Clustering
    • Business insight

KCS Council

Purpose

  • Guide adoption → sustain improvement
  • Cross-functional
  • Global representation

Responsibilities

  • Improve:
  • Content standard
    • Workflow
    • Tools
    • Reporting
  • Support continuous improvement
  • Shift focus from adoption to optimization

Distribution of Roles (Exam Logic)

Early KCS Adoption

  • Many Candidates / Contributors
  • Coach ratio: 1:5 – 1:8
  • No KDE yet

Mature KCS Environment

  • More Publishers
  • Coach ratio: ~1:50
  • Active KDEs
  • Just-in-time publishing

Ultimate Role Goals

  • High complexity environments:
    • Majority = Publishers
  • Low complexity environments:
    • Enough Publishers to avoid backlog
  • Zero "waiting to publish" articles

Key Exam Traps

  • KCS roles = job titles ❌
  • Only senior staff can be Publishers ❌
  • Coaches must be full-time ❌
  • Publishers approve everything ❌
  • Knowledge quality = QA team ❌

Technique 7.3: Assessing the Creation of Value (Exam Only)

Core Principle: Create Value, Not Activity

  • KCS measures value creation, not busyness
  • Never put goals on activities
  • Goals must be set on outcomes
  • Activities are used for trend observation only

Goals on activities will corrupt the knowledge base.

Measures for Individuals and Teams

Balanced Scorecard Concepts (Applied to KCS)

  • Link individual goals → team → organization
  • Measure from multiple perspectives:
    • Customer
    • Employee
    • Business
  • Distinguish:
    • Leading indicators (activities)
    • Lagging indicators (outcomes)

Activities vs Outcomes (Very Exam Important)

Leading Indicators (Activities)

  • Easy to measure
  • Easy to game
  • Examples:
    • Article creation
    • Article linking
    • Article modification

❌ Never put goals on these

Lagging Indicators (Outcomes)

  • Hard to measure
  • Hard to game
  • Measured after the fact
  • Examples:
    • Content Standard Checklist %
    • Customer success
    • Reuse by others (citations)

✅ Goals belong here

Why Goals on Activities Are Dangerous

Putting goals on activities will:

  • Create unwanted behavior
  • Destroy indicator value
  • Reduce judgment
  • Corrupt the knowledge base
  • Shift focus to gaming
  • Lower morale
  • Make leadership ineffective

Triangulation — Who Is Creating Value?

Why Triangulation Is Needed

  • Value is intangible
  • No single metric proves value
  • Must correlate multiple views

The 3 Required Perspectives

  1. Activity trends (no goals)
  2. Outcome performance (with goals)
  3. Content Standard Checklist (quality)

Think GPS: multiple signals → accurate position

  • Trends act like a dashboard
  • Knowledge workers must see:
    • How they're doing
    • Impact of their work
  • Lack of visibility → disengagement

Goals for Outcomes, Not Activities (Again, Yes)

  • Activities ≠ value
  • Trends show behavior direction
  • Outcomes show success
  • Conversations must focus on:
    • Behavior
    • Process
    • Understanding
  • Never focus conversations on numbers

Knowledge Worker Visibility to Measures

What Visibility Should Do

  • Enable self-correction
  • Show impact
  • Support coaching

What Visibility Must Avoid

  • Self-imposed activity goals
  • Competition on numbers
  • Score obsession

KCS Reports — Key Patterns

KCS Article Creation and Reuse

  • Early adoption:
    • Creation ↑
    • Reuse starts
  • Maturity:
    • Creation ↓
    • Reuse ↑
  • Pattern repeats with new products

KCS Article Life Cycle Trend

  • Healthy system shows flow:
    • Not Validated → Validated → External
  • Bottlenecks indicate:
    • Not enough Publishers
    • Process issues

Definition

Link Rate = Incidents with articles linked / Applicable incidents closed

  • Adoption of Solve Loop
  • Knowledge base usage

Healthy Range

  • 60–80% (context dependent)

⚠️ Never put a goal on link rate

Individual Profiles (Why Single Metrics Fail)

  • High link rate ≠ value
  • High creation ≠ quality
  • Must analyze:
    • Reuse by others
    • Modifications
    • Duplicates
    • Quality checklist

Content Standard Checklist + PAR

Why Both Are Required

  • Checklist = content quality
  • PAR = workflow adherence
  • Together they show:
    • Understanding
    • Judgment
    • Real contribution

Radar Charts — Value Footprint

Purpose

  • Fast visual assessment
  • Balanced view of performance

Rules

  • Activities → compared to team average
  • Outcomes → compared to goal
  • No goals on activities

What Radar Charts Show

  • Who is creating value
  • Who needs coaching

Is What We Talk About Important? (Yes.)

  • Talk about:
    • Behavior
    • Process
    • Understanding
  • Do NOT talk about:
    • "Fix your numbers"
  • Numbers are indicators, not objectives

Team Performance — Management Effectiveness

  • Radar charts apply to teams too
  • Example team indicators:
    • Customer loyalty
    • Employee loyalty
    • Collaboration health
    • Support cost
    • Avg Time to Relief
    • Web self-service success

Judgment is always required.

Focus Shift Through Phases of Adoption

Early Adoption Focus

  • Learning
  • KCS competency levels
  • Article creation / modify / reuse trends
  • Content Standard Checklist
  • Time to proficiency

Mature KCS Focus

  • Collaboration
  • Peer reuse (citations)
  • Customer success
  • Team outcomes
  • Loyalty metrics

Summary: Performance Assessment (Exam Gold)

  • Measure value, not activity
  • Distinguish activities vs outcomes
  • Never put goals on activities
  • Use triangulation
  • Use Content Standard Checklist + PAR
  • Focus conversations on behavior
  • Enable visibility and feedback
  • Evolve measures as KCS matures