Transcending the silos through project management office: Knowledge transactions, brokerage roles, and enabling factors

Abstract

Organisations often suffer from knowledge flow gaps between operational and strategic management levels, leaving much knowledge trapped within operations’ boundaries. Prior studies viewed the project management office (PMO) as a knowledge broker that can enhance the interaction between these levels. However, they take a single-faceted knowledge brokering perspective that fails to define the specific knowledge brokering roles of the PMO and offer highly fragmentary evidence on the associated enabling factors. To fill this void, we draw on the brokerage theory to develop a comprehensive theoretical framework in which we define specific knowledge brokering roles of the PMO and delineate their enabling factors for facilitating multidirectional knowledge transactions. We elaborate on three sets of knowledge brokering roles, each of which corresponds to one of three categories of knowledge transactions. Our model shows how PMOs can broker knowledge trapped in organisational silos by balancing bottom-up experiential learning with top-down deliberate learning while maintaining horizontal knowledge synchronisation.