Knowledge Matters™

As many of you know I am writing a doctorate with a working title of “Mapping Social Connectivity and Artefact Relationships to Improve Knowledge Productivity in a Complex Project-Focused Organisation ”. Last week I shared with you one of my early diagrams from my research. Today I will share three diagrams which together I think are very powerful. Again I have removed all the labels to preserve organisational anonymity.

Consider the network diagram below. The circles are projects coloured by business unit, and sized by project value. The large light blue project at the top of the screen is a project that will cost billions of dollars! The purple lines represent a critical reliance - that is Project A is critically reliant on Project B to deliver part of its capability. For example a project building an electricity distribution grid in a new town might be critically dependent on a project that is building a dam that will produce hydro-electricity. At this stage I have purposely not shown the direction of the dependency. As a manager where would you give priority to resource allocation?

Now consider the next diagram. The projects are in the same relative position and use the same colour-codes. This time I have included all relationships, and shown the direction of the relationship. More importantly I have sized the project by the number of incoming links. A project that links to another project is reliant on that project to deliver part of its capability. Note the change in size of the projects when viewed this way. A couple of the dark-blue projects that relatively are cheaper to deliver become very important. If resources are not assigned to these projects other more expensive projects may fail. Now where would you give priority to resource allocation?

Finally consider the next diagram, which shows how resources are actually assigned. This diagram keeps the same colour-coding, except the yellow circles represent project managers with direct accountability for the project. The projects are sized by value and have a unique shape for the responsible business unit. Which project manager don’t you want to be?!

I trust you have found this blog of interest and can see the value of networks. In this case I suggest understanding network relationships are potentially of high value when considering resource and task division. Network relationships matter!

Regards, Graham