Knowledge Matters

Understanding knowledge relationships

Network project management: Visualising collective knowledge to better understand and model a project-portfolio

Sat, 18/02/2012 - 10:16

Adobe pdf file Network project management: Visualising collective knowledge to better understand and model a project-portfolio . This is my PhD thesis which was accepted in January 2012. The abstract reads as follows.

This research contributes to the bodies of knowledge in the general management, knowledge management, project management, network analysis, and system dynamics disciplines. The primary contribution is the proof of a holistic business methodology that elicits the capacity of an organisation to engage effectively in its activities, particularly within project-program and project-portfolio environments. The methodology, which I have called Business Network Analysis™, bridges the instrumental and social action management discourses to help managers mobilise and leverage knowledge assets, and to understand their knowledge landscape. It provides any combination of quantitative, qualitative, and graphical answers across the ‘know-how, know-what, know-why, know-who, know-where, know-when, and know-how-much’ business knowledge components.

In project-program and project-portfolio environments the methodology can be used at the level of artefacts, processes, individuals, teams, departments, or organisations to:

A Review of NetMiner 4: Part 1 - Packages and Licensing

Thu, 16/06/2011 - 12:56

I’m often asked what tools I use for network analysis. Over the years I’ve tried most of them with the exception of Valdis Kreb’s Inflow . I’ve pretty much settled on UCINET/NetDraw because of its wide acceptance in academic circles; NodeXL because of its flexibility and ease of use for quick and dirty tasks; Sentinel Visualizer because of its link analysis, geospatial views, and timelines capabilities; and Cyram NetMiner because it is an all in one package with great visualisation capabilities. Of these Cyram NetMiner is my tool of choice, although unfortunately new licencing arrangements may change that (see below ). I’ve been using NetMiner since its version 2 release in 2005. In May 2011 Cyram released version 4 of NetMiner and I’m very impressed, although it’s not for the faint-hearted or novice! Here’s the first of a multi-part review.

There are eight packages and five licence types to choose from, which personally I found a bit confusing, particularly as some packages are standard to a licence. The packages are:

A Review of NetMiner 4: Part 2 - The Help System

Thu, 23/06/2011 - 11:06

Last week I looked at the packages and licencing arrangements in NetMiner 4. My conclusion was that some elements, like the Explore package and query composer and graph editor, should really be part of the standard Basic Package. I also challenged the Royalty licencing model which does not work for a small business, and received a couple of supporting comments. In this post I propose to look at the help system, with subsequent posts looking at the analytical, visualisation, statistical, and scripting capabilities.

I’ve been using NetMiner since 2005, beginning with version 2.3. I keep renewing or upgrading my licence because in my opinion the visualisation capabilities are unmatched by any other tool on the market, at least the tools I can afford. Couple this will an outstanding help system and an output that includes the analytics on the same screen, or a window, and the tool is unrivalled.  Depending on which packages you buy you have 28 or 36 analysis options, ranging from centrality, block-modelling and brokerage, to homophily and page rank, and measures for two-mode networks. However for the beginner, and even the intermediate, user these can be a bit daunting, and this is where the help system comes into play.

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