How to do effective knowledge management?

Great post..! From a project management perspective, the trick to knowledge management is to render the knowledge assets in the context of the execution of your process, not offline to it. This is quite a bit different than the early approaches to knowledge management that often required users to go and find what they need on the knowledge management portal and contributors to go and place things useful somewhere within the knowledge management portal. Often, the enthusiasm of even having a knowledge management tool wanes and the team is left having the kinds of experiences you summarized so well in your post.

But, process based best practice frameworks, unlike traditional knowledge management repositories and portals, allow for users to intuitively find the knowledge assets they need in the context of doing their work and for SMEs and process owners to continually maintain and add to these assets vis a vis lessons learned, new tooling, training, etc.

For a project management best practice framework, you can build one from scratch with the tooling of your choice or your can select from a number of fine solution offerings provided by vendors that specialize in this kind of thing. Here are just a few, in alphabetical order:

• BOT International's Processes On Demand


• Gantthead's Headway PM Process, JPACE PM Process, and many other processes


• IIL's UPMM


• PM Solutions' PMCoP


• Pragma Systems' ProcessMax (CMMI Compliant)


• Tenstep

Cheers!

Mark Perry


VP of Customer Care


BOT International

Dear Bipin,

Sounds to me like you have total comprehension of the situation and issues such as:

• Complexity - huge volume of information


• Scale - 30,000 people


• Resistance - aversion to change by the project managers


• Management skill - not all staff make for good managers, especially mid-level managers


• Motivation - embracing processes, what's in it for me


• Time - too busy fire fighting to have a look at the new line of fire engines

From your posts, it seems that you are describing an IT or software development firm and a large one at that. And you make a good point in that for some organizations, not all, embracing or dismissing the value of processes tends to be more of a philosophical matter rather than a business matter.

Not knowing more of your organization, it is hard to comment with confidence, but I would add one idea for you to think about and to use with your leadership team and process folks. And that is, "how do your same class competitors go about it?" Sometimes, the best way to introduce the need for and effect change within the organization is to benchmark how you are doing compared to your same class competitors or those that you are seeking to catch up with or stay ahead of.

And as one last small point of clarification, I would add that best adherence to process leads to predictable results, not necessarily the best results. If the process being adhered to is ineffective (too detailed, not detailed enough, not usable, not flexible, poorly designed, etc.) the results may be worse than if the fire-fighters simply keep at it via their ad hoc best efforts.

Having said all of that, it is really, really tough to get right, but worth it. I suspect that if everyone in your organization had your insight and understanding, it would be much easier. Keep at it..!

Mark Perry


VP of Customer Care


BOT International