Doodling Our Way to Effective Knowledge Management

When PETRONAS was first incepted and was entrusted with managing Malaysia’s oil and gas resources, our predecessors at that time had little to no knowledge on the how. And so, they learned. They sought the knowledge needed for the amanah they were carrying, and acquired the skills necessary, all to ensure that the trust was honoured and delivered. These knowledge and skills became the very foundation that the PETRONAS we see today was built upon.

In time, we began to accumulate talents whose expertise in their respective areas became invaluable, so we looked for ways to maximise the potential of these untapped knowledge and skills within our walls. We turned to Knowledge Management (KM) in ensuring that this knowledge can be properly stored, organised, and made accessible to the workforce no matter the generation— contributing towards PETRONAS’ long-term sustainability.

The Evolution of Knowledge Management in GHRS: Our Beginning

As part of our effort to retool the human capital equation, Group Human Resource Management (GHRM) has been focusing on reskilling and upskilling tomorrow’s talents, today—this includes seamless sharing of business knowledge across the Group, which is vital to facilitate the  development of talents and allow innovation to grow in PETRONAS.

In 2016, Global HR Services (GHRS) embarked on its KM journey to align with its evolution and establishment as PETRONAS HR centralised services provider. In the beginning, KM was all about records management– ensuring all records were safely kept and documented, and new processes were properly governed. During this stabilisation period, little by little, several initiatives have taken place to spark knowledge sharing culture among GHRS teams.

As we ventured into 2018, we established GHRS KM Framework and Roadmap, where we extended KM implementation into content management and collaboration platform online, named INGRESS, allowing easy access to GHRS general information and documents storage. Alongside that, we conducted a series of knowledge-sharing sessions known as ‘We Share, We Connect’ that has successfully encouraged our peers to connect with one another by sharing their knowledge and experience on topics that are uniquely theirs.

Putting customer experience at the heart of everything we do has encouraged us to re-strategise our KM approach in our two-year roadmap of 2020-2022. We have designed various KM solutions that addressed customer pain points and provided them access to the right information at the right time— facilitating them to make the right decision. Concurrently, this enabled them to improve their work productivity and efficiency as well as promoted self-service culture.

Transforming Customer Experience and Making HR Smarter

As the HR Service pillar, GHRS serves more than 35,000 PETRONAS employees globally. To ensure our customers are happy, we need to provide them with a consistent positive experience and satisfy their demand for excellent services.

In addressing these needs, four strategic focus areas have been identified in our KM Strategy 2020-2022. They are:

1. Structured Centralised Knowledge Repository 

Formerly, our KM system was only used as “a storage for documents” which resulted in having thousands of documents but difficult to search and retrieve. Taking this pain points, we have taken a step further by building GHRS taxonomy, categorisation, metadata, and versioning control to enhance the visibility of all documents. When employees search for any documents, they can easily find them using tagged metadata or keywords. They can preview documents through thumbnails, share links with colleagues, and sort the searching and view through metadata. The repository also uses a document review or approval workflow to allow co-creation and document authentication to ensure governance. With this, we get to improve the overall experience of using our centralised repository and our customers have a repository they can trust and utilise to the fullest, beyond just storing documents.

2. Knowledge-driven HR Shared Services

We have built a centralised reference site and knowledge base that are readily available 24/7 online. E-Guides on HR related matters have been centralised and customised to cater for different employee groups i.e. employees at large, superiors, and HR fraternity. The knowledge base is also accessible through mobile, allowing users to reach out to the Help Desk Agent as the first resort and refer to the e-Guides via instant search (Tier 0). Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) are documented, categorised, and searchable online as reference for all employee groups. These solutions encourage self-service culture among employees, minimise time spent to search for information, and ensure instant access to one single source of truth.

3. Team Collaboration and Collective Knowledge

At GHRS, we strive to continuously work to improve our service delivery to remain progressive. To empower the teams, we have designed online collaboration space to establish their online presence and help them manage their daily operational needs, documents, and focused knowledge. For instance, the Assurance team’s collaboration space centralises materials for auditing exercises. On the other hand, the quality team’s collaboration space consolidates references of process improvement like Lean Six Sigma. With this implementation, team members can submit ideas, register their projects, request for a facilitator, and many more through the online site. Not only that, we have also integrated external applications such as Power BI that allows dashboards to be displayed within the centralised team sites. The online collaboration space has helped the teams to better manage their daily operations, which subsequently increased their overall productivity. As an example, Gemba Walk for document retrieval was conducted in one of the team sites. This has resulted in significant reduction of time spent to retrieve online documents from 3.68 minutes (221 seconds) to 0.83 minute (49.6 seconds).

4. KM Governance

Understanding the significance of proper KM governance has helped us to stay on the journey of continuous improvement to meet our desired outcome. Various KM guidelines and User Guides have been developed and reviewed. At the same time, Upskilling Sessions and Engagements are constantly conducted to ensure proper governance and buy-in from users as well as stakeholders. Users are becoming more comfortable using the KM solutioning as its benefits to their daily work is just a simple click away.

By implementing these 4 strategic focus areas, KM has assisted us to deliver our business better through its systematic approach and KM solutioning.

Moving Forward

But our journey towards progress doesn’t stop here. We continue to strive for excellence in providing excellent HR services to our global PETRONAS family, and this includes fostering positive customer experience and transforming work productivity through KM solutioning. We continue to pave the roads ahead with promises to be our best selves with knowledge as our core foundation because here at PETRONAS, we aspire to be an organisation where knowledge inspires innovation.