This document provides an overview of knowledge management. It defines knowledge and differentiates it from information. It discusses how knowledge exists both explicitly in documented forms, as well as tacitly in people's skills and experiences. Effective knowledge management involves both managing explicit knowledge stocks, like documents, as well as facilitating knowledge flows between people. It emphasizes the importance of collaboration for sharing and creating new knowledge. Finally, it discusses how knowledge management is important for organizations in enabling innovation.
1. Insert your image in the master slide
What is Knowledge
Management?
Andrew Wall – United Utilities
Adrian Malone – Faithful+Gould
2. The APM Knowledge SIG
Judy Payne Steve Simister Andy Wall
Hemdean Oxford Consulting United Utilities
Adrian Malone Martin Fisher Katie Ball Philip Pamment
Faithful+Gould WRAP RBS PRP Architects
3. Creative Commons
The remainder of this presentation is licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this
license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to
Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain
View, California, 94041, USA.
These slides are based on an original set prepared by Judy
Payne, Director, Hemdean Consulting
5. Key Messages
•Knowledge is not the same as information.
•Knowledge can never be captured completely.
•Knowledge management must involve connecting people to
people as well as connecting people to information.
•There is no one-size-fits-all recipe for effective knowledge
management.
7. Your Experiences of Knowledge Management
what tools and techniques do you use
for managing knowledge?
12. Explicit and tacit knowledge
Explicit: knowledge that can
readily be codified into words
and numbers. Easy to share.
Difficult to protect.
Tacit: knowledge that is personal and
difficult to express. What we don’t know
we know. Difficult to share. The most
valuable kind of knowledge.
13. Why Does This Matter?
Managing explicit knowledge Managing tacit knowledge
Capture and codify as much as Encourage people to connect,
you can. Share. Quite easy. communicate and collaborate.
Quite difficult.
Document management, processes, case Communities of practice, conversations,
studies, lessons learned databases apprenticeships
14. Working relationships
Relationship Motivating Potential
State of trust Outlook Behaviour
type force outcomes
Highly For the good Breakthrough
Collaborative Synergy Responsible
invested of the whole innovation
For
Transaction successful Preconceived
Co-operative Win-Win Willing
oriented project success
outcomes
Reluctant or Win within
Competitive To look good Shrewd Compromise
cautious rules
Win at any
Adversarial Distrust Not to lose Cut-throat Unpredictable
cost
Hattori and Lapidus, 2004
15. What happens if you don’t
make a distinction between
knowledge and information?
17. Knowledge and knowing
Things an individual Things a group can
can express (eg express (eg shared
Explicit
concepts, rules, stories, shared
equations) jargon)
KNOWING
(AS ACTION)
Shared
Tacit
Individual skills, understanding of ‘the
intuition, judgement, way things work
etc around here’
Individual Group
Cook and Brown, 1999
18. DIKW
Data does not create
data information; information does
not create knowledge and
knowledge does not create
information wisdom. People use their
knowledge to make sense of
data and information. People
knowledge create information that
represents their
knowledge, which can then be
wisdom more widely shared.
Harold Jarche
19. A working definition of knowledge
Knowledge is a fluid mix of framed experience, values, contextual
information, and expert insight that provides a framework for evaluating
and incorporating new experiences and information. It originates and is
applied in the minds of knowers. In organisations, it often becomes
embedded not only in documents or repositories but also in organisational
routines, processes, practices and norms.
Davenport and Prusak, 1998
21. Knowledge flows
Project Individual
Profession
Organisation
Single project and organisation Programmes, portfolios, profession, society…
22
22. Do you focus on knowledge flows or
on knowledge stocks?
23. What helps knowledge to flow?
•Time, trust and territory (Miles, Snow and Miles)
•Hire smart people and let them talk to one another (Davenport and Prusak)
•Shared language
•Think of and acknowledge everyone as a knowledge worker
It’s the
environment, stupi
d!
25. Hierarchies and Networks
Hierarchies Networks
•Relationships mandated •Relationships voluntary
•Top-down control •Emergent, bottom-up
•Good for sharing information •Good for collaboration,
and managing explicit knowledge-sharing, and
knowledge learning
•Tend to be formal •Tend to be informal
•Managed ‘traditionally’ •Managed by letting go
26. Communities and Teams
Communities of practice Teams
•Long-term development of •Focus on specific time-bound
knowledge deliverables
•Leaders establish •Leaders have authority over
direction, connect members members
and facilitate discussions
•Seek to expand the resources •Consult peers and experts for
and experts available to help with specific, known
individuals problems
•Knowledge stewardship with a •Focus on a given problem – no
view to solving problems that ongoing responsibility for
have not yet been discovered developing knowledge
McDermott and Archibald, 2010
28. Some Key Principals
•Knowing is a human capability. Knowledge itself can’t be managed
•Collaboration is a pre-requisite for knowledge creation and sharing
•Collaboration is voluntary
•What we can do is create the right environment and provide
appropriate tools for people to collaborate and to create and share
knowledge.
29. Stocks and flows
With thanks to Chris Collison for the butterflies metaphor
31. Why Knowledge Management Matters
Why collaboration and knowledge are important
Economic era Standardisation Customisation Innovation
Meta-capability Coordination Delegation Collaboration
Business model Market Market Market
penetration segmentation exploration
Growth driver Learning-curve Know-how Entrepreneurial
gains and scale transfer to new empowerment
Economies markets
Organisational Functional Divisional, Alliances, spin-
model matrix, and offs, and
network federations
Key asset Tangible assets Information Knowledge
Miles, Snow and Miles, 2000
32. KM in Project Environments
Knowledge and projects
Knowledge is the most valuable of an organisation's
intangible assets. Organisations exist to create, integrate
and transform knowledge into goods and services.
Projects create a 'portal' through which the knowledge of
single or multiple organisations can be accessed and
transformed.
Project-based working in its various forms provides a fast and
flexible means of organising knowledge resources.
Kogut and Zander 1992; Lampel et al 2008; Sydow et al 2004
33. Future Events
Tuesday 14th May 2013. Birmingham 18:00-20:30
Where does information management end, and knowledge
management begin?
Tuesday 25th June 2013. Warrington 12:00 -18:00
Managing knowledge in a project environment (TBC).
Editor's Notes
This might seem like an odd way to start a presentation, but…What it meansWhat’s your organisation’s position on IP in presentations?
There are more slides in this pack than I have time to present – this is intentional. When you view the full pack you will see that some of the “Errors” towards the end have very little or no content attached – I hope you will take forward the spirit of creative commons and as a community and collaboratively we can create a resource pack for the Project Management community on knowledge management.
No? What’s the difference then?But what about my lessons learned database?Oh dear. So why are we here?
THIS SESSION IS INTERACTIVE
Shout out. Write on flip chart. Delegates give each one marks out of 10 for effectiveness.Come back to these later and see whether your ideas have changed.
Session loosely structured around the Eleven deadliest sins of KM, an article published in 1998. The scary thing is that a lot of the errors described in the article are still made. Handouts on tables. Not going to cover all of them. Get through as many as we can.
The most important error, and the cause of all the others.
What is knowledge? How does it differ from information? What is information? What is data? What is the relationship between them? Not a trick question. More of a philosophical one. There is no right answer. Which is why it’s important to have a working definition of knowledge.One of the reasons for the confusion between information and knowledge is that there are different types of knowledge.
The most common (and useful) way of classifying knowledge.Once explicit knowledge has been codified, it isn’t really knowledge any more – it is a representation of the author’s knowledge, but it is information. If someone writes a book, the reader has to apply their own knowledge to make sense of it. And different readers will probably interpret it in different ways. Tacit knowledge – how do you recognise a known face in a crowd?
If you don’t have a working definition of knowledge? Shout out.Suggestions: you invest all of your effort in capturing lessons learned and then find they are not being re-used; you choose the wrong intervention - for example issuing a user-guide when a seminar or on the floor coaching would have been more effective, you miss the opportunity to innovate
If knowledge can be managed then it must be a ‘thing’ – something you can get hold of. If that was true then you could put knowledge in a wheelbarrow. Of course you cannot do this. You could put some brains in a wheelbarrow but that would not be the same thing (and you would probably attract the attention of the authorities!) You could put some people into a wheelbarrow but you would still not have knowledge – unless of course they started talking to eachother.
If knowledge is treated as information, no surprise that it is treated as objects that can be captured and stored – usually in databases. Organisations need to manage data and information in this way – but it isn’t managing knowledge. It’s managing representations of explicit knowledge, the tip of the knowledge iceberg. And missing out much of the valuable part of the iceberg.
An imaginary conversation I had with you while I was preparing this presentation.The point here is that transmitting knowledge isn’t enough. Us telling you about KM doesn’t mean knowledge is flowing. For knowledge to flow, you have to understand what we mean, make sense of it, make sense of it using your existing knowledge about KM and your project, your organisation, whatever... And then you have to use it, otherwise it is of little value to you.Also, none of what I’m saying is new...(which is, incidentally, why this presentation is licensed under Creative Commons)(and, also incidentally, this is the difference between teaching and learning)So how do we make knowledge flow?
Also called knowledge transfer.These are some of the flows we are concerned with – first the simple case of a single project in a single organisation, showing the connections between individuals, the project and the organisation. Even in this simple case there are 12 knowledge flows.And of course it's not that simple… (second diagram) The concept applies equally to programmes and portfolios, and to the project management profession – the diagram on the right is a simplification of this. Knowledge also has to flow between projects and organisations – and I've added the concept of the knowledge of the profession. This is where APM comes in.Final point – there has been much discussion on LinkedIn about Lessons Learned – probably the best-known knowledge process amongst project professionals. Lessons Learned is essentially a knowledge or information flow from an individual to a project or an organisation. You can see from these diagrams that this is just one small part of the overall picture.Knowledge sharing is messy. All the elements in these diagrams influence and are influenced by each other.
Return to KM tools and techniques on flip chart. Pick a few and ask how they are used in practice. Where knowledge is ‘captured’, how do you know whether it has been understood? Or even accessed?
These are general
But how do you know which ones to use? No decision tree. Complicated or complex? It’s not the tools and techniques that are important, it’s the environment they are used in. The tools just help reinforce the environment.
With touch points between the two – eg CoPs (networks) sponsored by people in the hierarchy
Another way of thinking about stocks and flows. Which would you rather have?