Knowledge Matters™

Today I thought I would share with you two new diagrams from my doctorate, because I am actually not so sure about their utility, and would welcome any feedback you might have. That said I do feel they elicit interesting management questions.

Consider the network diagram below. For a change it’s a different organisation to the one we have been looking at in previous blog-posts , but I have applied the same principles. The graph shows a programme of projects, all of which are dependent on one another for one reason or another. 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.

The circles are projects coloured and grouped by business unit. This organisation assigns risk to six categories, which are shown as the red squares. The categories are real things in the real world rather than budget and schedule. ...

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Today I thought I would share with you two new diagrams from my doctorate, because they elicit interesting management questions. Consider the network diagram below. The graph shows a programme of projects, all of which are dependent on one another for one reason or another. 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.

The circles are projects coloured and grouped by business unit, and sized by value. The large light blue project at the bottom of the screen is obviously the project with the largest budget. The lines represent the dependency and are coloured by the importance of that dependency – red lines representing a critical dependency.

As a manager where would you give priority to resource allocation? I suggest if you subscribe to the dollars view of the world the bulk of your effort would be directed to the light blue business unit. Now consider the next diagram. ...

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I’ve been thinking about stakeholder management a bit lately; some of it in the context of project management and the PMBOK® , some in the context of Business Network Analysis™ Techniques , and some because I am just interested in it. Today I had a Eureka moment , and the Stakeholder Management Target™ is the result. (I like targets, perhaps because of my former calling!). The idea is a bit raw and needs some work, but here is the essence of it. The Stakeholder Management Target™ (version 1) is illustrated below.

You should note there are four sectors as positioned by the cross-hairs. The sectors are defined by stakeholder ability to influence organisational processes and their interest in the outcome of an organisational initiative. The concentric circles of the target represent stakeholder concern or interest in the initiative. ...

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Yesterday Patrick Byrne and I provided a presentation on ‘Understanding the Complexity of Program Management’ to the Melbourne Chapter of the Project Management Institute. Just over 150 project and program managers attended the session. This was the first time we have exposed our Project Knowledge Model and Business Network Analysis techniques to a public forum of our peers. ...

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For the past five years I have worked semi-permanently in an organisation that manages a portfolio of 211 projects. This naturally has led to an interest in project management, and more particularly the nexus between knowledge management and project management. The nexus between the two disciplines is interesting. Projects can be conceived as entities or sites where knowledge is created, used, shared, stored, combined, and so on. All projects have people who work with knowledge under time and budget, and other resource constraints. In fact it is easy to build a cogent argument that says knowledge gaps in a project actually are the project risks. It is just as easy to expand the argument to include knowledge management as component of project management, where project managers integrate their people, process, technology and content resources.

The project management discipline has tried to embody knowledge management by publishing its best practices in a single repository, known as the Project Management Body of Knowledge or PMBOK® for short. ...

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