Facts, Processes and Common Understandings: The Management of Knowledge in Project Based Organisations

Abstract

During the last couple of decades, project based organisations (PBOs) have been on a strong increase (e.g. Prencipe and Tell, 2001; Whitley, 2006) as the fast changing environment and conditions for conducting business call for more flexible, innovative organisational designs. Project teams are one way to organise for these changes. PBOs are especially suited to react to changes and initiate team learning, and they are also said to be the key learning unit in organisations (Senge, 1990). In this way PBOs can be seen as small knowledge intensive factories where knowledge is created, adapted, and re-framed. However, PBOs face a number of challenges. One of these is not to “reinvent the wheel” as organisational knowledge can be fragmented and very team specific. In such organisations it may be difficult to know what knowledge is available in the organisation if there are no formal mechanisms or established department responsible for capturing, storing and sharing knowledge in and between project teams. More specifically one has to assess whether the organisation is able to capitalise on knowledge gained in one project and transfer it to other projects. Will team members with diverse skills – who work together for at limited period of time, who might not know each other, and who may not expect to collaborate again – be able and willing to share knowledge? Do team members even have to handle multi-teaming? All these issues, and more, aim at an effective understanding of knowledge management. Paying attention to the role of knowledge management as well as the role of social processes, practises and patterns is relatively new in relation to knowledge management in projects and PBOs as Bresnen et al. (2003) have pointed out. According to Ajmal and Koskinen (2008) the benefits of knowledge transfer have long been recognized in PBOs, but the effectiveness of the knowledge transfer varies considerably. Effective knowledge management is complex, but essential. Therefore, this paper focuses on how the alignment between an organisation’s strategy, products, and knowledge management strategy can help clarify which knowledge management initiatives will be most effective. The aim is to discuss how different types of knowledge enable various ways of managing knowledge, i.e., how they create, share and transfer knowledge in and between projects. Therefore, we study how more views on knowledge management and related initiatives in