Tips for Knowledge Sharing in Teams
| If you’re role is anything like mine, sometimes being a project manager can be a little bit lonely. We don’t spend much time with other project managers, because our focus is on the team and the people we work with there. So how do project managers learn from each other? We’re great at learning from project experience: you’ve probably got retrospectives and project lessons learned meetings in the diary for the next quarter. But when do we get to hear what our peers are up to? Here are some tips for fostering a culture of knowledge sharing in project management teams.
If there’s more than one project manager in your department, chances are you have team meetings. Make knowledge sharing a regular agenda item. Have someone present about their current project. Or have someone share the top lessons learned from within a project. Have someone share about their experience of using a process or making a new connection in a different part of the business. Use Shu Ha Ri as a way of packaging up your lessons. Schedule project management coffee chatsSometimes it’s nice to have chats with your peers. This can work well if you haven’t got many project managers in your direct department, so you can’t invite them to a formal meetings, but there are others doing the same role elsewhere in the business. Build an informal community of practice. You don’t have to call it that, but you can set up a shared mailing list or have your own ‘directory’ of project managers across the organisation. Share resourcesModel the behaviour you want to see by sharing resources. If you’ve got particularly good feedback on a steering deck or a business case, share it with the team. Invite others to do the same, perhaps start a ‘good documents’ folder on your shared drive so that everyone can upload examples of docs that have worked well for their purpose. If you don’t have a knowledge repository already, set one up. Establish a central location (e.g., a shared drive, intranet site, or dedicated software) where other project managers can store and access documents, best practices, lessons learned, templates, process flows etc. Leverage technologyYou’ve probably already got collaborative tools like wikis, Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Confluence. Set up a channel for knowledge sharing and collaboration to support your community of practice. Make it a place where people can ask each other questions, so you can help each other out in real time. Reward sharingIf someone is supportive of knowledge sharing, recognise that and thank them. You don’t have to be their line manager to nominate them for an internal recognition award. Drop a note to their manager and say how much you appreciated their input. Feedback from conferencesThis is something that has worked well for me in the past. If someone has been to a conference or some other kind of professional event, get them to do a short brief to the rest of the team. They can share their key takeaways, talks they enjoyed, thoughts and reflections on the event. It might encourage others to go next time. If you hear about free webinars or other training opportunities, why not share them round with the people in your community of practice? Afterwards, meet up and discuss your key takeaways. You could even watch the webinar as a group – host a watch party! How do you foster an environment of knowledge sharing in your team? Let us know in the chat below! |
