KM in projects - networking meeting with PMI Belgium members 25th of Nov

Hi Brikena, Sorry I missed such an interesting meeting by a few days. May you share the meeting results please?

Regards, Mirana

I would be interested also.

Best,

Arnaud

Hello,

I have just joined the group today. My request is that as we announce an event, to also think of sharing some notes of the meeting with others afterwards so that the conversation can continue, especially for those who have not been able to join you.

In fact, my question would have been in what ways does KM applied at organisation level differ from KM within a project? Are these topics raised because people have a different interpretation of KM (multiple perspectives or exposure) or does the purpose of KM differ from being KM within an organisation and KM within a project?

I see that the group has been initiated by people who work on Monitoring and Evaluation - what is their perspective of the positioning of KM vis-a-vis M&E?

I hope to engage with ths group more in 2015 - after I have listened to my own advice of writing up and sharing what I have experienced (or our organisation, CTA, on KM more recently) before coming back to you.

kind regards

Krishan Bheenick

Great question !

Actually most of what we do can be seen as a series of "projects". What might be different is the scale of the problem you face depending of the size of the organisation or the project. Large organisations have a huge KM issue to tackle that is related to their legacy way of working which involves many generations of people that have many different perspectives and ways of doind things. What is striking is that very often large organisations fail to change the way they do KM (or just manage information) over time and rather add new modalities on top of older existing practice. 

That indeed has the effect of having multiple overlapping and often contradicting ways of doing things co-existing in the organisation. One example is the survival of the paper trail (full paper archives, paper documents circulated through internal post systems etc) with old fashionned file sharing (shared folders) with email, with web-based tools up to the cloud and mobile services ...

Within projects I presume that you define a way of working and managing knowledge fit to purpose and you kind of stick to it till your project ends.

Again for massive multiannual projects peddling through enormous amounts of data and information created over time face a similarly important challenge. Even more challenging is the ability to extract real lessons learned to help others not to make the same mistakes. But that is precisely what we miss. In too many cases we lose the knowledge and experience from our projects and fail to learn and improve our efficiancy, effectiveness and impact in the long run.

To my understanding, M&E is a part of KM and KM may be the future of M&E Units, or at least include M&E Units

- as long as we tend to a results-oriented culture

- Capacity building management, process improvement, communication and so on are also part of KM.

KM at a project level is lighter than the one at an organization level since the projects come to an end though the organization not, and the practice in an organization is the result of several layers of ways of doing things as Christoforos underlined it.

On a previous assignment, I have helped a 10-year international organization to improve their M&E system as part of their organisational development. The M&E officer was overloaded with the massive reporting, a result of different experts recommendations... (I have also seen such problem on multi-years projects/programmes with different experts recommending different data collection and various reporting schemes).

Given the new context/priorities after 10 years of operating, we had to think out/take into account:

- the actual needs and sources of information (what, when, who, how)

- the lessons learnt extraction

- the different schemes of decision (who when how)

- the knowledge sharing schemes 

given the constraints (HR &finances) and to define together a new KM system to be implemented step-by-step (with hypothesis like 'finances would allow to hire more KM staff in 3 years' etc...).

On the other hand, we could have the best KM system, if the management is not convinced that KM and M&E are tools to alleviate their workload and improve the results, we would have very few success stories to spread.

Hello,

Glad to see this topic created some discussion about KM. Christoforos you are right on your interpretation that's why Project Managers try understand how to use KM for the purpose of their projects.

I can recommend you this interview from Ginger Levin on why KM is crucial for PM: http://www.guerrillaprojectmanagement.com/knowledge-management-success-…

I can send you the presentation of the event although it doesn't give all information on what was discussed and shared by PMs. As it was an informal networking meeting there are no notes as such, I am sorry for that.

Best,

Hi Brikena 

I would be interested in the PPTs as well,

What are some of the issues that came up during the meeting and were there some shared good practices that we can draw upon?

Thanks

Laureene