Knowledge management

KNOWLEDGE IS

David Eggleton, co-author of upcoming APM research on project success, explains just how critical knowledge management is in making projects fly

Most 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 di erent 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 knowledge management can improve project outcomes

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

How important is knowledge management to project success?

Slightly important

Fairly important

Important

Very 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. E ective documentation and storage mean that project professionals from di erent teams, or even di erent parts of the organisation, can access that knowledge to avoid pitfalls in their own projects.

Don’t reinvent the wheel

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.

Such a lack of knowledge dissemination is an issue of major importance, as storing knowledge that is not then used is essentially wasted time and resources. So don’t just write these lessons learned reports with specialist jargon and leave it on your hard drive never to be read by anyone – make sure people can find, download, open and understand them, and ideally, if they implement the work, that it gets the right results. Make your knowledge FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reproducible). It may sound straightforward to codify your knowledge and make sure other people learn, but many of our research interviewees said it is fiendishly di cult.

Communities of practice

Many participants emphasised the importance of having communities of practice for transferring tacit knowledge. These are also worth considering as a people-centric way of transferring tacit knowledge. We’ve heard so many people say they want such a community, but that they didn’t quite know what it was that they wanted. According to my favourite knowledge management textbook (Knowledge Management in Organisations by Hislop, Bosua et al), a community of practice is simply a group of people with a common interest, common values and a common body of knowledge. They could be described as not particularly di erent from an APM Specific Interest Group.

They can be thought of as being a bit like an onion – a series of layers with a core team at the centre and increasingly peripheral players as you get further away. But the most valuable people aren’t at the centre of the onion – they all speak the same language and share the same values. It’s those at the edges who are members of multiple communities who are the most valuable and the most interesting to us. These ‘boundary spanners’ can be members of several communities and bring in new knowledge and ideas. How can you use this concept?

You could consider including team members with a designated knowledge management role to act as a boundary spanner between di erent projects as part of the project management o ce. This requires an exceptionally curious person who gets on well with all sorts of people and who isn’t afraid to ask seemingly obvious or awkward questions. View them as pollinators, moving between several projects with similar characteristics to share ideas or knowledge so that every project within the portfolio gets the benefit of the same knowledge.

‘Boundary spanners’ can be members of several communities and bring in new knowledge and ideas

Making the e ort to stop, think and learn

There was a discussion during the semi-structured research interviews around the level of commitment when it comes to knowledge management activities. This isn’t particularly surprising, as we found out when starting our research; starting a project is inherently exciting, anything seems possible and the deadline seems to stretch further than you can imagine. You just want to throw yourself into it, and as a result, project teams are inclined to start projects without drawing on past experiences. Equally, when you’ve finished the project, you’re exhausted and maybe even a bit sick of it and you just want to move onto the next big thing, so you forget to document lessons learned. It was suggested that investing resources in embedding knowledge management in the project life cycle could yield better outcomes.

It’s quite di cult to know what knowledge is valuable and needs to be stored, and what knowledge can be safely filed in the bin. Many new innovations are a result of crossfertilisation of di erent ideas coming together, so it is easy to think that it is best to collect everything. But there is a trade-o to be made between storing as much knowledge as possible that might be useful, and the costs of storing what is ultimately superfluous. It can be tough to make sure all the knowledge management puzzle pieces are there at the start of your project, as quite a lot of it depends on your organisation.

Key players

There are a few key players for embedding the process of knowledge management within your organisation. The first is HR; the second is IT. While we might wish that everyone would share their knowledge freely, many people face a dilemma between sharing knowledge to benefit everyone and hoarding it to protect themselves in future. HR can provide incentives to promote altruistic practice through normal recruitment and selection practices, job design or through the appraisal system. IT can help with both codified and tacit knowledge management. For codified knowledge, they can capture that knowledge and make it available on your organisation’s intranet, and as long as it’s wellindexed, this can be incredibly useful.

With tacit knowledge, which is much harder to share, a database that maps the expertise to individuals or groups is the better way to go, so people know who to talk to. But there’s one key factor that will a ect how well you can perform: your corporate culture. If your corporate culture is one that tends to guard information, it can be much harder to get your colleagues to share knowledge, compared to one where knowledge sharing is culturally accepted and expected. You can be part of creating the cultural shift towards a knowledge-sharing organisation, but it will be a long, challenging process, although the benefits will be worth it for the projects in your portfolio.

Ultimately, these factors are all within your control as a project professional. Provided you are open and honest with your colleagues and share your reports, you are managing your knowledge. It also gives you an excuse to have co ee or Zoom calls with unusual people in your organisation – who knows what knowledge you might gain?

There is a trade-off to be made between storing as much knowledge as possible that might be useful, and the costs of storing what is ultimately superfluous

Dr David Eggleton is a lecturer in project management with innovation studies at the University of Sussex, and is co-author with Professor Nicholas Dacre of upcoming APM research on project success