Managing Project Management Knowledge for Organizational Effectiveness

Knowledge is increasingly seen as a key but often underutilized asset. While Knowledge Management (KM) tends to focus on aspects of the capture, storing and retrieval of knowledge, knowledge creation, dissemination and application is also vital. Organizational Learning (OL) addresses much of this, looking at the way organizations learn and apply new knowledge, skills and behaviors in order to improve their performance. Many companies believe that projects provide an important means of capturing knowledge and building organizational learning, both for general enterprise-wide issues and for the management of the projects themselves. Nevertheless, there is substantial evidence that at both the enterprise and the project level, it is simply not done well. This paper reviews extensive research and experience in project-based KM and OL over recent years. It draws on three major research projects conducted by the Centre for Research in the Management of Projects (CRMP) on project management bodies of knowledge, and on KM and OL. It shows: • how crucial is the distinction between explicit and tacit knowledge, particular in knowledge creation; • the special benefits, and challenges, that project management brings to KM and OL; • that the nature of the knowledge content [“space”] crucially influences the nature of KM and OL. These findings have implications for several areas of project management’s on-going interests, not least capability maturity models, project management frameworks, supply chain management, and the relationship with [business] performance. Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning Many companies know that much of their effectiveness lies in the way they manage, and use, knowledge. While this is well accepted, and extensively researched, for companies, it is equally true for project-based organizations. Yet here the research is much thinner. This paper draws on three substantial research projects led by the author into aspects of knowledge management and organizational learning in projects: the CRMP (APM) BOK, KLICON, and PROBOL. 1 Specifically these research projects were: 1. The project management Body of Knowledge (with a research team comprising colleagues from CRMP – Professor Stephen Wearne and March Patel – with support Knowledge, and knowledge management, are somewhat elusive terms. Knowledge management (KM) has been defined as the process of systematically and actively managing and leveraging the stores of knowledge in an organization; as the framework for discovering, capturing, transmitting, and reusing knowledge to gain competitive advantage [1]. While the management of knowledge is not a particularly new concept – knowledge has been with us for ever; libraries have been around since writing was invented – in the modern sense of the discipline there is great emphasis on the technologies we can use to capture, store, access and use knowledge more effectively. And here is where the first potential for confusion arises: we need to differentiate knowledge from information and data. Knowledge can be considered as the end of a chain that begins with data and passes through to become information, leading ultimately to insight (cognition). Data is bits and bytes of information – uninterpreted information. In the CRMP research projects, knowledge is taken as the cognitive ability to generate insight based on information and data. While the distinction with data is relatively clear, that between information and knowledge is less so. We take knowledge to be the ability to use information in a predictive manner but recognize that what is knowledge to one person in this sense could be just information [conceptualized data] in another. (Literature, like life, is replete with instances where the context was assumed, and what was thus taken as ‘predictive knowledge’ was in fact misinterpreted information.) The value of knowledge depends on the context of the decisions or actions to which it leads, a point that will become crucial to the arguments to be developed in this paper. KM in practice tends to deal simultaneously with both information and knowledge. KM practices will, for example, be interested in the capture, filing and retrieval of directories of information of value to the enterprise – supplier information, technical and scientific information, ‘who knows what’ directories [Yellow Pages], etc. The distinction that is crucial here is between explicit knowledge – that which is ‘readily available’ – and tacit – that embedded in a person’s experience and often difficult to articulate clearly [3]. Crucially, as Figure 1 shows, explicit knowledge is more amenable to IT management while tacit requires contact with people (Subject Matter Experts, Communities of Practice, etc.). KM in practice tends to deal with both. ‘Management’ knowledge, as opposed to scientific or engineering based knowledge, is typically much more tacit than explicit (as we shall see later, when discussing the nature of project management knowledge). Scientific knowledge is more publicly 2. IT tools for knowledge management in construction (with Marsh Patel and Taha Elhag from CRMP, Professor Hilary Kahn from the University of Manchester, with Kvaerner and Ove Arup): KLICON: 1998-2000, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC); 3. Project-based learning for business performance (with Irene Loch from CRMP, and Professor Joseph Lampel & Pushkar Jha from City University, with Bovis Lend Lease, BP, DFID, Fujitsu Consulting, GlaxoSmithKline, Lloyds TSB, and Rolls-Royce): PROBOL: 2001-3, funded by EPSRC 2 Nonaka contrasts knowledge and information as follows. “Information is indifferent to human values, context free, and without intentions or commitment. Knowledge is grounded in values, experience, and purposeful action. Knowledge is meaningful; it is relational and context-