In the Sixth edition of A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK ® Guide), released in 2017, the Project Management Institute introduced a new process within the Executing group dedicated to Knowledge Management. The process refers to using existing knowledge and creating new knowledge to achieve project goals and contribute to organizational learning (PMBOK ® Guide 6th, PMI, 2018). Therefore, it requires the project manager three fundamental actions: drawing from the past, creating in the present, and sharing for the future.
Tacit and Explicit Knowledge
The distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge was first introduced by the philosopher Michael Polanyi in his "The Tacit Dimension" (1966).
Thirty years later, the economists Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi deepened the concepts in their "The Knowledge-Creating Company" (1995). They identified the roots of Japan's world leadership in the automotive and electronics sectors in Japanese companies' innovative capacity to create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies.
- Tacit Knowledge: tacit knowledge is about know-how, personal experiences, insights, and visions. It is knowledge "embedded in the human mind", linked to specific contexts and more challenging to extract and encode.
- Explicit Knowledge: EK is the knowledge that is codifiable through words, numbers, and images and, therefore, easier to document and share.
To contribute to the organization's continuous improvement and create value inside it, we must acquire, analyze, document, and transfer this knowledge, making it available and accessible. These operations may be easier for the explicit knowledge: we could make use of various reports, documents, memos, or text formats. For the tacit one, we need dedicated processes and actions, which allow what is "embedded in the mind "of a team member, or another stakeholder in our project, to be transferable and enrich other individuals.
Three key actions to manage project knowledge
1. Use existing knowledge
It means drawing on the organization's wealth of knowledge and consulting it to start, plan, and manage a new project. Using this knowledge, deriving from previous projects, we can improve our project and its results: we could, for example, prevent a problem encountered in the past, avoid repeating a mistake already made, or adopt a good practice that emerged from an old project.
2. Create new knowledge
This action includes identifying, analyzing, and documenting new knowledge gained by the project team or other key stakeholders to improve the organization's future performance. A common way to collect and preserve project knowledge is represented by the "Lessons learned", i.e., the lessons learned from the project, the indications on how we addressed/should have addressed issues, situations, and problems encountered in the project experience to avoid a mistake or to improve a process.
3. Share knowledge
Transferring knowledge acquired during the project to the organization and key stakeholders is the fundamental step to ensure that we can learn from experience and enrich that wealth of knowledge to draw on before, during, and after a new project. The sharing of knowledge is a critical factor for the quality of the organization's future performance: an adequate transfer of project knowledge can improve both projects or project phases that we or those who after us will manage and the organization's operations and processes.
Techniques to manage project knowledge
If, on the one hand, explicit knowledge can be easily shared and transferred through a simple conversation between colleagues or reading a report, on the other hand, tacit knowledge requires more commitment and greater interaction. To create new knowledge and facilitate the sharing of tacit knowledge within the organization, we may include the following techniques in our knowledge management strategy:
- Storytelling – Participants are asked to express personal visions, intuitions, and experiences to colleagues, using a story. Through the story, it will be easier to share ideas and give narration or images about acquired know-how.
- Knowledge Fairs – Let's imagine setting up space with "knowledge pavilions" like a fair, in which participants move freely to exchange experiences.
- Work Shadowing – It requires the individual who has to acquire the knowledge to follow the person who owns it, like a shadow. It is an observation-based technique that allows learning through the experience of functions and activities.
- Reverse Shadowing – It is the inverse of work shadowing, as it requires the expert, the one who owns the knowledge, to follow the team member in carrying out his activities to provide him with guidance and suggestions to improve his work.
- Creativity and ideas management techniques – Through brainstorming sessions, for example, using mind-mapping, i.e., creating mind maps, facilitating discussions and developing related concepts around a keyword, visually showing how the elements of the map interact with each other.
- Networking – Promote spaces and moments of informal interaction, also by resorting to social networks. One form of networking could be online forums where people can ask open questions and start a conversation with experts and non-experts to compare and exchange knowledge.
- Communities of practice – These are collaborative learning groups that include people who do not necessarily share the same job function, but share a particular area of interest. These groups allow people to share and exchange knowledge and information for a longer period. Group activities can be done in person or virtually, through digital platforms.
- Knowledge-sharing events – Organize or promote participation in seminars and conferences.
- Workshops – Problem-solving sessions or Lessons Learned Sessions could be carried out to identify and analyze the lessons learned.
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