Knowledge Management in Project‐based Companies: An Organic Perspective

Citation

Maqsood, T. (2009), "Knowledge Management in Project‐based Companies: An Organic Perspective", International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, Vol. 2 No. 2, pp. 318-320. https://doi.org/10.1108/17538370910949338

This book is a welcome addition to the existing knowledge related to management of projects. Sooner or later knowledge management needs to be recognized as a distinct knowledge area in the project management body of knowledge and this book serves this purpose well. The book is equally good for practitioners who want to familiar themselves with this emerging area of management of knowledge in a project context and especially for post graduate students who are undertaking research degrees or coursework in this domain. The book is simple to read and provides logical progression from chapter to chapter making it easy and effective to understand. The task of explaining the messy concept of knowledge and its management is an arduous task and authors have done justice by explaining these in simple language. The main focus of the book is that creating and managing knowledge is a people‐related rather than an information technology function though it recognises the use of technology at times as an enabler.

Chapter 1 discusses the beginnings of knowledge management and explains the components of knowledge management and provides a context relating to the significance of using knowledge management by project‐based organizations. The chapter recognizes the challenge that knowledge management involves a multidisciplinary approach. Chapter 2 delves into explaining the project‐related concepts so the readers could understand the environment in which this book is written. Chapter 3 provides the basis for understanding the approach this book has taken to explain the concept of knowledge management by presenting an analytical tool known as “Holistic concept of man (HCM)”. This concept is based on autopoietic epistemology as opposed to cognitivist epistemology. In autopoietic epistemology, the world is not pre‐given and cognition is a creative function and hence knowledge is a self‐productive process and a component of the autopoietic. HCM consists of an individual's three basic modes of existence which are consciousness, situationality, and corporeality. This tool serves the purpose very well because project‐based organisations and people working in these organizations can be viewed as knowledge‐intensive units and using the concept of HCM helps us gain a better understanding of concepts such as knowledge, learning and knowledge sharing in the project context. The readers should give particular attention to understanding the concept of HCM as this will simplify the understanding of knowledge management. This is continued in Chapter 4 which describes different type of knowledge and competence and how are they related to the project participants. It is useful to read that knowledge is an individual's perception, skills and experience depending on individual's world view and is regulated by consciousness, situationality and corporeality of that individual.

Chapter 5 discusses the heart of knowledge management which is “learning”. The basic purpose of managing knowledge is to foster and incite learning. This chapter discusses various types of learning and explains the concept of organisational memory. Again through the help of HCM, learning that takes place at different levels in project‐based organisation is analysed. This chapter also appropriately discusses various factors that affect learning and development of organizational memory. Reading through these factors such as foresight, hindsight, error harvesting, problem with success, resistance to change, creative tension and absorptive capacity it becomes extremely clear why learning and subsequent development of organizational memory is a challenging task.

Learning cannot take place without sharing of knowledge. Chapter 6 provides different mechanisms by which sharing of knowledge happens among participants working on a certain project. This chapter put together a holistic set of things that may affect knowledge sharing such as role of leadership, motivation to share knowledge, caring attitude, physical systems and proximity, organizational cutlery, values, norms, beliefs, attitudes and assumptions, creating an effective project team culture and implications of project leaders. This chapter, by far, is the biggest chapter of the book. It provides effective guidelines for organisations to instil knowledge sharing culture such as recognising/praising the efforts of individuals involved in knowledge sharing, developing a shared vision, fostering trust among the staff and providing emphasis on teamwork. This chapter identifies that there are two main factors influencing the knowledge sharing in project‐based organisations, first one is “experience” of the organisation and second one is “openness”. The more experience in terms of prior knowledge an organisation has, the better it is able to complete the project successfully. Openness indicates stakeholders' openness in terms of willingness to share knowledge and be transparent with each other and thus be trustworthy.

Chapter 7 takes the knowledge management further to the strategic level and explains the role of strategic management in integrating knowledge and intellectual capital managements in project‐based companies.

Readers interested in articles that these authors have written relating to this book may refer to (Koskinen et al., 2003; Koskinen and Pihlanto, 2006; Koskinen and Aramo‐Immonen, 2008).