Elizabeth HarrinDirector| RebelsGuideToPM.comLondon, England, United Kingdom
One of the issues that I hear time and time again is that we don't share knowledge within the company's project management community. The project managers in my business want to 'share knowledge' (whatever that looks like). We currently have fortnightly conference calls at which projects are discussed and people ask for help if they need it. But that doesn't seem like enough.
What else do you do with other project managers to share knowledge and lessons learned between you? Saving Changes...
Bernard GorePortfolio, Programme & Project Professional| NZ PoliceWellington, New Zealand
Very true, a common experience, and there's a bunch of reasons why this doesn't work as well as we might wish.
Most organisations, for all they might claim otherwise, do NOT welcome admission of failure, and for that reason, and professional pride, it is hard to admit in an open forum of your peers that you need help with something within your professional area of expertise. Therefore any knowledge sharing has to focus on a "push" rather than "pull" model, and that is much more effort - because you can never know what out of the massive amount of knowledge we have and accrue is actually of value to others.
Even if we share very openly, this just creates a large unstructured pile of knowledge, and it takes a lot of effort to categorise and structure this in a way that makes it accessible and useful when required. And that's without even considering whether all knowledge contributed is good quality and auditing/rating it to deal with this.
I'm not saying knowledge sharing isn't important - indeed I spent a decade in law firms working on ways to share it in a challenging environment, and I've tackled it in other environments such as adademia where pride (or arrogance) and narrowness of vision are additional barriers. it is truly a difficult thing, and takes a lot of design, and ongoing effort, to do well.
Sharing as you described at team meetings is possible, but depends entirely on a close and trusting team, which is rare in our increasingly volatile and contract/temp-resource model. It is still possible, but needs to build the right level of trust and dare I say intimacy within the team, and maintain this effectively as the team changes. Specific well-deigned and executed team building, mixed with exercises that help them understand the value of information sharing, needs to be a continuing activity. I've run quite a lot of this for various organisations, and may post some of it on this site. Saving Changes...
Elizabeth HarrinDirector| RebelsGuideToPM.comLondon, England, United Kingdom
Thanks Bernard - look forward to reading more if you do get a chance to post more on this site. Saving Changes...
Vasanth DharmarajProject Manager - SAP Practice| Zieta TechnologiesBangalore, Karnataka, India
Very good Bernard. Thought provoking thread...Elizabeth Saving Changes...
Luckily, my PM colleagues are also my friends so there is no such a problem in the company where I work. So as a friends we discuss project issues quite often, formally or informally. Saving Changes...
For me sharing knowledge is one of the way to increase my knowledge be it PM knowledge or Technical knowledge. Being a s/w professional i have a hobby of writing technical blogs, posting my thoughts in forums. Developed an internal community for engineers of my organization has helped a lot in sharing knowledge.
Leveraging social media to share knowledge via Whatsapp Groups, LinkedIn, Twitter etc is one of the several ways i use to share knowledge. Saving Changes...
Vasanth DharmarajProject Manager - SAP Practice| Zieta TechnologiesBangalore, Karnataka, India
It's good to know Mr.Anil and Mr.Sabedin Saving Changes...
Anonymous
It's good to know Mr.Anil and Mr.Sabedin Saving Changes...
Manas De AminDirector| Computer Technology Group KolkataKolkata, West Bengal, India
It's a common problem faced by everyone across the globe. What we have adopted to counter this, is a documentation process for each even pilot projects.
There's even separate templates for issues faced, resolution/work around and lessons learned. Saving Changes...
Gyanendra Kumar NayakAssociate Project Manager| Hewlett PackardBangalore, Karnataka, India
We do knowledge sharing by putting the right info in the share point but I know that's not enough. I feel like it can be improved in a collocated environment or may be more in an Agile space where team sitting face to face and definitely knowledge transfer will be easy. For a distributed environment, its not that easy and we need to have share point where we can share the knowledge with others. The drawback is, we can not document everything which is in our mind. If we talk face to face, its definitely add on and we can share many information. Saving Changes...
Navdeep JoshiSr. Consltant - CA PPM| TBDBangalore, Karnataka, India
What if "knowledge sharing", as such becomes a part of the performance cycle ? I guess, that would help. In addition a 360 degree feedback on the same would be the way for the management to convey the message across the organization .... NJ Saving Changes...
