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. (A competing body of knowledge is Projects in Controlled Environments, which is usually abbreviated to PRINCE®. However, an examination of both bodies of knowledge reveals large overlaps). The PMBOK® identifies nine knowledge areas as follows:

• integration management; 
• scope management; 
• time management; 
• cost management; 
• quality management; 
• human resource management; 
• communications management; 
• risk management; and 
• procurement management.