Turning Communities of Practice into Real Shop Windows for Knowledge at Company X.

About the Client

Company X is a global strategy consulting firm. By the time of this engagement, the firm had grown into a strategy-only practice with thousands of consultants across more than 20 offices worldwide. Like most elite strategy firms, Company X’s competitive edge rests heavily on its ability to reuse hard-won project knowledge rather than relearn it on every engagement.

Industry Context

Knowledge management is close to existential for firms like Company X. Leading strategy and consulting firms have invested in internal knowledge infrastructure since the late 1990s to prevent consultants from “reinventing the wheel” on similar engagements, and some of the largest firms reportedly spend well over $100 million a year sustaining that infrastructure. The core challenge industry-wide is rarely a shortage of expertise; it is a systemic failure to capture, organize, and surface that expertise when a consultant needs it. The CoP redesign Iknow delivered for Company X — tightly tagged content, use-case-driven retrieval, and taxonomy-based navigation — anticipated the same underlying principles that later became foundational to the AI-powered knowledge assistants many consulting firms have since built atop their repositories.

Current Situation

Company X’s KM repository, built on SharePoint 2013, was the central collection and search location for the firm’s project records and materials, supported by an extensive taxonomy housed in the SharePoint term store that drove metadata tagging, navigation, and dynamic content display. The firm had already deployed CoP intranet sites for each sector and service line, but management felt the firm was under-utilizing both the main search functions and the CoP sites themselves, and asked Iknow to lead the CoP site redesign and implementation effort as the first tangible step in a broader KM improvement program.

• Content overload without effective filtering. CoP pages relied on query-driven lists with insufficient filtering for best-practice content, weak content management in the underlying repository, and unnecessary features like news feeds and discussion boards that added clutter rather than value.
• Inconsistent navigation across communities. Content types and use cases were not standardized, and top-level navigation had gaps and inconsistencies from one CoP to the next — confusing for any user, and especially disorienting for new staff.
• Real coverage gaps. Despite the overload of unfiltered content, the sites still lacked critical material, including people/expert data and detail pages, CoP case-delivery tools, and consistent research guide coverage.
• Insufficient guidance for users. Sites offered limited commentary on what a given page or component contained or was for, and case and document titles frequently lacked descriptive abstracts.
• Structural constraints on incremental fixes. Limited time and resources, IT access restrictions, and a lack of usage metrics made it difficult for Company X to improve the sites gradually without a more structured, ground-up redesign.

• Diagnose the specific usability and content management issues undermining the current CoP sites and KM repository.
• Design a new SharePoint architecture and page template that made the best CoP content easily available for key knowledge use cases.
• Implement and deploy the new sites with sustainable content management tooling and documentation that Company X’s own CoP content managers could operate independently.
• Deliver a positive user experience across practice areas and countries while building directly on Company X’s existing taxonomy and repository investment, rather than replacing it.

How Iknow Structured the Work

Iknow structured the engagement around three sequential phases — Diagnostic, Design, and Implementation — that moved from understanding the root causes of underuse to designing a reusable SharePoint architecture to deploying and documenting that architecture across Company X’s full portfolio of communities.

Key Activities & Decisions

• Diagnostic Phase. Iknow reviewed prior user feedback, conducted a full content audit covering content types, item volumes, and the static/dynamic split, and held extensive interviews with Company X’s staff at all levels. Iknow also reviewed current content management procedures and the technical setup of the existing CoP sites, including their use of lists, libraries, and Content Query web parts — synthesizing the findings into four clear problem categories that reframed the issue for Company X’s leadership.
• Design Phase. Building on the diagnostic findings, Iknow defined requirements, prepared wireframe designs with several navigation options, and produced a technical design document specifying the SharePoint features required for the selected design. The recommended architecture used SharePoint’s managed navigation and term-driven pages: each CoP site was built on a dedicated term set copied from Company X’s main taxonomy, each page queried KM data using specific terms from that set, and content was organized into use-case tabs — Selling, Project Delivery, Ideas, Research, People Search, and Projects — auto-populated from tagged and flagged items. Each site also included a scoped search feature and a free text/image area for CoP-specific branding.
• Implementation Phase. Working from a SharePoint development environment through staging into production, Iknow built new site templates from the approved designs and worked with each CoP to review and select content for inclusion and to confirm that the tagging was correct. Iknow also developed PowerShell scripts to support batch tagging and content promotion from CoP-supplied Excel input, alongside SharePoint grid views for rapid manual editing. Iknow tested the new sites internally and with selected users, remediated issues that surfaced, and produced documentation covering both new site creation and ongoing administration.

Stakeholders & Collaboration

Iknow worked closely with Company X’s KM leadership, CoP content managers across every practice and sector line, and end users at all levels and in multiple countries, ensuring the final architecture reflected both consistent firm-wide navigation and each community’s specific content needs.

Balancing Firm-Wide Consistency With Practice-Specific Needs

Company X’s CoPs — spanning sectors from Healthcare to Industrials to Retail — each had distinct content and branding needs, but users still needed consistent, predictable navigation when moving between communities. Iknow addressed this by building a single, reusable, term-driven template architecture with shared use-case tabs across every CoP, while letting each site inherit its own content automatically through a dedicated CoP term set and customize its presentation through a free-text/image branding area — delivering consistency without forcing every community into an identical page.

Making the New Sites Sustainable Without Ongoing Technical Support

A redesign that only content specialists or IT could maintain would quietly decay once Iknow’s engagement ended. Iknow addressed this by developing PowerShell-based batch tagging and content-promotion tools driven by simple Excel inputs, alongside SharePoint grid views for quick manual edits, paired with clear documentation — giving Company X’s non-technical CoP content managers a well-defined, repeatable process for periodic bulk review and updates.

Operational Outcomes

• Deployed the redesigned CoP sites on schedule across Company X’s practice areas and sector lines, including Healthcare, Industrials, Life Sciences, and Retail, spanning the firm’s global office network.
• Delivered a reusable template architecture that lets Company X create new CoP sites and subsites quickly by copying standard pages and taxonomy terms, with page content populating automatically from existing tagging.
• Established a content governance process, supported by PowerShell tooling and SharePoint grid views, that reflects tagging and best-practice flagging changes on the live sites immediately.

Strategic and Organizational Outcomes

The new CoP sites received very positive feedback from Company X users across practice areas and countries, giving KM leadership a concrete, well-received proof point to carry into the broader knowledge management enhancement program the CoP redesign was always meant to launch. By building the new architecture directly on Company X’s existing taxonomy rather than replacing it, Iknow also protected and extended the value of the firm’s prior KM investment.

Timeline to Impact

Iknow completed the diagnostic, design, and implementation phases within the nine-month engagement, with the new sites live on schedule and generating positive user feedback immediately upon launch — giving Company X an early, tangible signal that the “shop window” strategy was working before committing further investment to the broader KM program.

Core Skills

• Knowledge management platform strategy & design
• SharePoint architecture & development
• Content governance & taxonomy application
• Knowledge portal information architecture & UX
• Change management & user adoption

Methods & Frameworks

• Diagnostic – Design – Implementation methodology
• Content audit and usability assessment
• Wireframe-based iterative design
• Managed navigation / term-driven page architecture

Technologies & Tools

• Microsoft SharePoint 2013 (Managed Navigation, Term Store, Content Query Web Parts)
• PowerShell scripting for batch content tagging and promotion
• Excel-based content management workflows