How Much Do You Need to Know?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned  

It doesn’t matter whether we are focusing on project managers or project teams. Survey after survey has suggested the importance of having project team members understand the reasoning behind why a project is being undertaken.

The thinking is that if employees understand the context behind the initiative, they will have a greater ability to work effectively--making decisions that consider the purpose and needs of the project, delivering solutions that are designed with the “bigger picture” in mind. At the same time, if people understand why they are being asked to perform their tasks, they are more likely to feel engaged with the work and be more prepared to go above and beyond in order to ensure success.

I’m not going to suggest that none of that is true; I recently worked on a survey that looked at portfolio performance, and once again the understanding of context was a strong indicator of success for the portfolio. However, we very rarely ask the question, “How much do people need to know?”, and I think that’s important.

In some cases, there may be restrictions on how much information can be shared because of confidentiality considerations, but that’s not the norm. More commonly, we decide for ourselves what the appropriate level of knowledge sharing is, and in my experience there can be a considerable amount of …

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