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David Eggleton, co-author of upcoming APM research
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ost organisations are extremely good at managing their traditional assets – things that are tangible like land, labour and capital. But what about intangible assets? Often, the most valuable assets are in your employees’ heads, but how can you transfer what they know? There are different types of knowledge. It can be explicitly codified knowledge in physical or digital form (such as reports or books), or it can be tacit, in an experiential form. Tacit knowledge is much more challenging to transfer because you gain it through experience – it’s just like riding a bike. You can’t just read a book and start riding a bike; you learn it by doing it. It’s more personalised and subjective than codified knowledge, and much more challenging to share.
How important is knowledge management to project success?
How knowledge management can improve project outcomes
Fairly important
Knowledge isn’t just a single amorphous thing that can be easily transferred – it can be extremely hard to share. So how can we share the knowledge we’ve gained through our projects so that we can identify examples of best practice? Or, just as importantly, how can we identify what doesn’t work so well so we can avoid repeating mistakes? Some organisations have experimented with tacit knowledge databases so that people can identify and log skills that can then be taught in an apprenticeship arrangement. As part of our research for an upcoming APM report looking at project success,
Nicholas Dacre and I have looked at the
50 SU M M ER 2021 PROJECT
BLACK YELLOW MAGENTA CYAN
Slightly important
role of knowledge management as a way of improving successful project outcomes. Knowledge management can be defined as the organisational activities facilitating the creation, documentation, storage, sharing and application of knowledge the organisation collectively owns. Our survey found that knowledge management is a very important condition for project success, with 89 per cent of respondents considering it ‘important’ or ‘very important’. Learning from past projects was identified as the key aspect to knowledge management practices. Research shows that there are extensive organisational and individual benefits for project teams that engage with knowledge management processes. Documenting lessons learned during the project, as well as in postproject reviews, can lead to organisational learning, better decision-making and improved project management practices in the future. Effective documentation and storage mean that project professionals from different teams, or even different parts of the organisation, can access that knowledge to avoid pitfalls in their own projects.
Don’t reinvent the wheel Important
Very important
This sounds like an obvious thing to do, but despite the importance attached to knowledge management, we found that organisations have significant challenges with the process. Many keep on reinventing the wheel to solve a problem that keeps cropping up because they didn’t learn from other projects. This frequently wasn’t because the documents didn’t exist; it’s that they couldn’t be found.
Source: upcoming APM research
ART
on project success, explains just how critical knowledge management is in making projects fly
