Posted by: OneOne Hundred
on 27 Apr 2009
An article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) entitled "Don’t Just Capture Knowledge - Put it to Work" begins
“What’s the point of capturing organisational knowledge if it’s going to be tossed in some file and forgotten? That’s all too often what happens to lessons from post-mortems and after action reviews.”
Given the research which indicates some 70% of the projects are regarded as failures, this suggests that the lessons analysis undertaken by organisations like the NAO and Audit Commission are simply filed and forgotten.
In previous articles we examined a Learning Project Organisation. The first step in creating such an organisation is to put in place processes for capturing lessons learned. Many organisations may have an internal knowledge base or specific tools for knowledge capture - the important thing is that they are structured and used in a manner that creates value for the project delivery organisation.
To avoid the
Posted by: OneOne Hundred
on 27 Apr 2009
Essentially a project is a temporary organisation with staff drawn from different organisations, departments and skill bases to undertake an ad-hoc task. When that task is finished without a process in place to manage it, the knowledge and experience accrued by the project team disperses with team members on project closure. During the project lifecycle, further dispersion of the knowledge occurs through the churn of personnel arising from changes in resource need, changes in responsibilities, career moves and promotions. Indeed it is often the case that few of the team in place at project closure were involved in the project initiation. The implication is that without formal measures to acquire and promote the lessons learned during the project, the knowledge will be lost or dispersed on or before project closure.
