Last week I was at the second meeting of a research & working project group as part of the Henley Knowledge Management Forum. I'm what's called the Member Co-Champion of the Project, which also has two Academic Co-Champions/researchers, and the project's focus is to improve the success and quality of Projects within organisations by making them 'knowledge-enabled'. That is, to find out - or work out and then tell the World! - what projects would look like, how much more successful they'd be, if Project Managers really took account of sound Knowledge Management.
Quite ambitious and potentially very wide-ranging, but we members want to come out with some very practical guidance that we can take back to our organisations & put to use in improving how we work. We're still at quite early stages of deciding what specific questions we'll address: suggestions so far include:
- How can we make sure that a Project is not only a mechanism for delivery, but also a means for making best use of, capturing and sharing learning?
- What KM tools can improve project management outcomes?
- What can you do in your next project to avoid re-inventing the wheel?
- Why (in what ways) are Projects different from Organisations?
Seems that many organisations are increasingly going down a road of being more project-based, and so needing their people to be (more like) Project Managers. Meanwhile, many Knowledge Managers see the Project as a very good subject on which to bring some KM to bear - instead of trying to transform a whole organisation, it's got to be more manageable to deal with a discrete block of work that has a defined start & end, specific outcomes & objectives - should be easier to define the 'knowledge outcomes' and concentrate on evaluating success and sharing the results, etc.
That's the hope anyway - will keep this blog posted.
Meanwhile, one random idea that's come out of our discussions is 'Entry interviews': What are all of your areas of special interest and expertise? When you join an organisation, wouldn't it ge great if someone took the trouble to talk to you to find this out, and that your 'extra-curricular' expertise were then expolited and developed, for the sake of the organisation and colleagues? Many areas of expertise often have little or nothing to do with why you're doing your specific job - shouldn't organisations dig these out and make good use of them?