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Monday, May 14, 2012

Project Knowledge Capture

Knowledge Capture can be painful!


Organizations have a lot of knowledge. This knowledge is critical to the organization’s success and is housed in many places. Knowledge transfer among employees is always a challenge, and most organizations do not have processes in place to ensure that timely knowledge transfer takes place.

An organization’s culture can inhibit effective knowledge transfer. Ineffective knowledge transfer can cause knowledge to be lost or be unclear when and if it is transferred.

Some ways to overcome ineffective knowledge transfer are:
  • Ensure meeting minutes are captured for important project meetings
  • Create an environment that is conducive to collaboration
  • Set performance objectives around formal and informal knowledge transfer mechanisms
  • Establish regular knowledge transfer procedure reviews (meetings, documents, reports, etc)
  • Hire people that are flexible and open to good knowledge transfer practices
  • Conduct brainstorming sessions around effective knowledge capture and retention methods
  • Reward collaborative efforts
  • Use failures as a way to create new knowledge

A common language is important for effective knowledge transfer to take place. Glossaries, scope statements, project objectives and project assumptions will help you to begin the process of knowledge transfer in the early stages of your project.

2 comments:

Michelle Symonds said...

Individual project managers usually do learn from their own previous experiences but knowledge gained from past projects can only be used to improve subsequent projects if that knowledge is captured and shared across the whole organisation. Then other project managers can actually use this knowledge in their own projects.

Too often knowledge/data repositories are poorly organised and it is difficult to easly find information that may be of some use.

Michelle Symonds said...

Hi Stephen, wondered if you would be interested in featuring this blog post about motivating a project team as a guest post? You can contact me at michelle.symonds@projectaccelerator.co.uk
Thanks!