The title of my PhD thesis is ‘Visualising Collective Knowledge to Manage a Portfolio of Projects’. It contributes to the bodies of knowledge in the project management, knowledge management, and network analysis disciplines by proving a methodology that elicits the capacity of an organisation to effectively engage in its activities. The methodology, which I have called business network analysis and registered as BNA®, allows managers to examine quantitatively, qualitatively, and graphically, macro and micro linkages between nodes, where nodes are individuals, projects, project teams, business units, entire organisations, or even business functions, policies or documents.

In particular my research has:

• established the utility of managing a complex project, or a portfolio of projects, by mapping artefact, social, organisational and knowledge relationships; 
• provided a methodology that allows managers to visualise and weave their artefact, social, organisational and knowledge relationships, thereby enabling knowledge worker and organisational productivity; and 
• provided a complete end-to-end example of a knowledge management intervention, which is replicable in other organisations.

The importance of these contributions should not be underestimated. Project failure is an expensive commercial reality, often costing millions and sometimes billions of dollars. Storey and Barnett (2000) claim as many as 84% of knowledge management system projects fail. Similarly information technology project failure is ‘widely recognised as the most pressing problem facing the IT profession’ (Standing et al. 2006, p. 1148). Why?

The Standish Group has extensively researched and published the reasons for project success and failure in corporate organisations in the United States of America (Standish Group 1995, 1999, 2000, 2003). Figure 1 shows the Standish Group key factors for project success.

Figure 1: Project success factors (Standish Group 1999, p. 4)

The people factors collectively account for 60% of project success, yet conventional project management methodologies, like the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) (PMI 2004) and Projects in Controlled Environments (PRINCE2) (Office of Government Commerce 2005), continue to adopt either a production task-driven approach or a functional information-processing approach, rather than a network relationship approach (Pryke & Smyth 2006).  These methodologies are simply not good at identifying relationships, be they knowledge artefact or people relationships, which in turn means relationship risks are rarely managed.

Understanding relationships in complex environments is an essential risk mitigation strategy. The BNA® approach described in my thesis, elsewhere on this website, and to be described in detail in subsequent blogs, adds to the manager’s armoury, and offers a means to effectively manage a complex project, or portfolio of projects. Quite simply relationships matter.

Regards Graham

References:

Office of Government Commerce 2005, Managing successful projects with Prince 2, 5th edn, Stationery Office, London.

PMI 2004, A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, 3rd edn, Project Management Institute, Newtown Square, PA.

Pryke, S & Smyth, H (eds) 2006, The management of complex projects: a relationship approach, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford.

Standing, C, Guilfoyle, A, Lin, C & Love, P 2006, 'The attribution of success and failure in IT projects', Industrial Management and Data Systems, vol. 106, no. 8.

Standish Group 1995, CHAOS report.
---- 1999, CHAOS: a recipe for success.
---- 2000, What are your requirements?
---- 2003, Unfinished voyages: a follow-up to the CHAOS report.

Storey, J & Barnett, E 2000, 'Knowledge management initiatives: learning from failure', Journal of Knowledge Management, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 145-56.