Breaking Barriers: The Power of Knowledge Sharing in Project Management - Cor Scheepers – Consultant @pm.ideas
Projects drive change and innovation in organisations. To enhance competitive advantage, knowledge gained in these projects needs to be shared effectively. A major challenge is that knowledge resides in the minds of employees, and it is not readily available to others who might need it.
Knowledge sharing is the process of employees and team members openly and willingly sharing their expertise, insights, information, and experiences with their colleagues. It includes the transfer of explicit knowledge, implicit knowledge, and tacit knowledge to help improve individual and collective performance.
Explicit knowledge is information that can be easily codified, documented, and transferred in a formalized manner. Examples include manuals, reports, and procedures.
Implicit knowledge is the practical know-how and skills that individuals possess but may find challenging to express explicitly. This is shared through hands-on training, mentorship, and direct experience.
Tacit knowledge is deeply rooted in an individual’s insights, perspectives, and personal experiences. This is challenging to formalise and articulate, often residing in intuition, beliefs, and cultural context. This shared through direct interaction and collaboration. Some organisations may have an unorganised wealth of company information, while others have a knowledge hoarding problem. Both environments can cause team members to struggle to access the information they need to do their job to the best of their abilities.
Knowledge hoarding occurs when an individual possesses information that would benefit team members, but they either refuse to share it or make it difficult to access. This may sound intentional or spiteful, it often is not. Individuals tend to spend the majority of their time on their core responsibilities and, as a result, fail to find time to document their knowledge or transfer it to others. This can be a massive detriment to growth and productivity for any organisation, especially when these individuals decide to leave the organisation to pursue other opportunities or retire.
Knowledge hoarding causes distrust amongst the team, kills collaboration efforts between other departments or remote teams, and cost the organisation valuable time and money. It can hinder employee innovation and agility, ultimately diminishing the organisation’s competitive advantage.
Constant knowledge sharing brings significant benefits to the organisation. An effective knowledge sharing system increases interaction in the workplace (even between remote teams), leads to a rise in creative problem solving, mitigates knowledge loss as employees retire or move on, and gives every department easy access to the information they need when they need it. This speeds up response times and improves the customer experience.
Project knowledge management
Project knowledge management includes the creation, acquisition, codification, and transfer of knowledge within and across projects. The ability to share and transfer knowledge is crucial for project teams to leverage past experiences and apply them to future projects. The temporary and unique nature of projects poses challenges to knowledge sharing and transfer. While projects offer opportunities for knowledge creation and learning, their temporality and discontinuities hinder the effective transfer and sharing of knowledge with other parts of the organisation.
The biggest challenges for knowledge sharing in projects are:
- The temporary nature of projects. When a project is finished, the team is often disbanded, and the team members go on to work on new projects. This can make it difficult to transfer the knowledge that was gained during the project to other teams or to the organisation as a whole.
- The diversity of project teams. Project teams often include people from different disciplines and backgrounds, which can make it difficult for them to communicate and share knowledge effectively.
- The pressure to deliver results. Project teams are often under pressure to deliver results on time and within budget, which can make it difficult for them to take time and document and share their knowledge.
Despite these challenges, there are a number of things that project based organisations can do to promote knowledge sharing.
- They can create a culture of knowledge sharing. This means creating an environment where employees feel comfortable sharing their knowledge with others, and where they are rewarded for doing so.
- They can also establish knowledge sharing processes and procedures. This could include things such as after-action reviews, knowledge bases and mentorship programs.
Factors influencing project knowledge sharing
These factors influence the application of knowledge sharing mechanisms by project managers:
- More experienced project managers have more confidence and tend to share their knowledge and experience.
- The project team size, rather than the project duration, affect the use of project knowledge management tools.
- In large projects, it is logical to use various types of meetings and also meeting minutes. This contributes to better informing the members of large teams.
- The more complex the environment (containing greater uncertainty and dynamics) the higher the intensity of project knowledge management tools used.
- Where the environment is more dynamic in the organisation, project managers tend to use more personal and ad hoc tools (e.g. storytelling, brainstorming and debriefing) and also use lessons learned more often.
- When the level of competitiveness is higher, project managers tend to use more creative was of knowledge sharing, such as storytelling and case writing.
- There is a relationship between higher customer dynamics and meeting minutes. The meeting minutes often document and agreement on project changes reached during the meetings. Knowledge sharing in the form of lessons learned is more frequent, as it involves the identification of various problems or risks connected with customers.
- The more complex the project, the more often project managers use project knowledge management tools, both oral and written.
