The whole purpose of KM is to minimize repetition through reuse and knowledge sharing and follow the best practices to drive innovation and quality across the organization. The Project KM system must be able to free people from "unproductive" and repetitive tasks and facilitate them to accomplish more innovative and productive tasks. At this stage the people will be more valuable and productive.

If the process person says that we want something very simple because our people are busy, then you need to make them understand the truth behind KM or drop KM. People are supposed to be busy. You need to question why they are busy and what part of their activity makes them so busy. If there is repetition, people will be busy unnecessarily. If people are busy without having a scalable business model, then you can grow only through adding more experts. At some point in time, you will realize that it is difficult to find good people. In this case, you will never acheive the productivity you aim for.

The piece-meal approach bring more pain rather than addressing the pain points of the organization. If you talk to people involved in driving KM in projects, they will share one of the following stories:

• I have the project task management, time-sheet management and a repository to upload and download documents.
• We drive Knowledge-Sharing sessions. Once in a while we call the experienced people and request them to share their experience with others in K-Forum (1-2 hours session).
• We have discussion thread where someone can post the issues and other can respond.
• We definitely have the KM initiative to manage the proposal. We assemble a team of people and request them to work on various parts of the proposal. We maintain reusable templates in a common repository. Then, we put together the documents created by the team.
• We have e-Learning piece where we ensure that the project team members can go through this course (max 10-15 days per year) before they embark on the project.
• We have periodic project meetings and brainstorming sessions to discuss the issues or ideas.

Like these, you will hear many such short stories. I agree all these are part of KM but it is all over-simplified model for Project KM initiatives. It creates silos and defeat the real purpose of KM. It will look good initially but add no value in the long run. This type of piece-meal solution do not require a big investment and effort to drive it. If these stories and many more are not achieved with the holistic picture in mind, then the usefulness of the KM project will be very low.

Trying to achieve this in pieces without a concrete plan and finding ways to glue it together will only lead to disappointments. At the same time, I am not advising you to do everything in one shot. We only need to visualize project knowledge and project experience, draft a plan that includes everything and drive it in multiple phases by leveraging a comprehensive KM solution.

Embark on the Project KM initiative only when you have the holistic picture in mind. It definitely needs an investment and effort. Keep the following points in mind if you really want to drive KM in Projects.

• Quick solutions are not scaleable and not useful beyond the basics. This will only give you false sense of achievement. You need the best systems and consultants to do wonders and to effectively drive KM to achieve project excellence.
• Have the budget ready and ensure that the people are energized or can be energized.
• Project Management Office (PMO) should be setup and the PMO should drive the KM initiative along with the PM initatives. Form a KM task force with the right people within the PMO.
• Measure the outcome of the projects and maintain the history of all the events and achievements. Analyze the trend.
• Implementation must be accelerated and the goal must be accomplished and measured using key performance indicators (KPIs).

Project KM must address:

• Experiential learning that help project team learn and share on a daily basis
• Each and every task must be linked to "Know How" and "Know Who" - the experts who have accomplished that tasks before (both "correctly or incorrectly") and the experiences behind the accomplishments.
• When explicit knowledge base doesn't address, there should be an easier way to locate the experts and leverage the tacit knowledge base (the human capital).
• Learning planner must be linked to individual skills gap. No two person have the same skill sets. Hence, a generalized learning planner will be ineffective.
• Knowledge base must be innovatively structured so that this comprehensive knowledge representation (common, project-specific) can be easily accessed.
• Knowledge base with poor knowledge access is worse than not having any knowledge.
• Meeting, project review and discussions must be integrated with the project activities and knowledge base.
• During the creation of knowledge, there will be so much noise. Hence, you must have a very systematic approach to filter it without losing valuable and true knowledge.
• Project dashboard to gain insights into what is going on in various projects is absolutely essential.

Refer to Wise Project Management to learn more about the Project KM systems. If you have any question and to share your comments, you can contact the author Lakshman Pillai at lakshman.pillai@lpcube.com.

To speak in a conference or in your organization, kindly send an email to sales@lpcube.com. We can customize the presentation.