Unavoidably, some knowledge is lost, but your project team members can skip “reinventing the wheel” if you employ knowledge management. Although this comes at an extra cost, your team does not need to retain all knowledge because most of it becomes outdated or just impractical sooner or later. You want to retain the essential knowledge that can help you run smoothly your current and future projects. Since the team’s composition during a project’s lifetime may vary, knowledge transfer is imperative.

Project Information and Data vs. Knowledge

Unlike project data and information, which are part of project documentation, project knowledge includes all the team’s proved and effective methods of executing the project. Project knowledge is the team’s know-how. While project knowledge is specific to the project, you can extrapolate and apply it to other projects in your organization. In time, project knowledge becomes your organization’s competitive advantage.

In many cases, you can duplicate raw data and information (interpreted data). Recreating knowledge, however, requires much more time for the team members to refine available information through a combination of their intelligence, intuition, and experience, but also through innovation, practice, trial and error, and more. This is why project knowledge requires management: acquisition, retention, and transfer of knowledge within a project team.

Knowledge Acquisition

Knowledge acquisition requires time and experience. For effective knowledge acquisition, the team needs a suitable environment where there is no blame culture and where management promotes informal communication, innovation, and trial and error.

Knowledge Retention

Knowledge retention is more complicated than just creating a well-organized document repository available to all team members. This is because knowledge is more than just explicit know-how that you can easily index as a document. There is also tacit knowledge, or knowing how to do something, usually a prerogative of a few experts in your team. Knowledge, especially tacit knowledge, is transferred through people, not spreadsheets or slideshows. (more…)