Knowledge Matters™

Although Pat Byrne and I have gone our separate ways we still do a good deal of collaboration. Pat recently presented our Defence BNA™ case study at the 5th Annual Project Management Australia Conference in Melbourne, Victoria. (We are indebted to Mark Blackburn who has allowed us to put this case-study into the public domain). You can view the presentation at this link , and his commentary on the conference at this link . It is substantially the same as our presentations earlier in the year to the Project Management Institute in Sydney, Melbourne, and Canberra, and our presentation to the Australian Institute of Management.

Last week I co-presented it with Cheryl Durrant (no relation in case you're wondering) to the Knowledge Management Roundtable in Melbourne. We modified the presentation a little, but it is substantially the same - the differences in the slides being at the start and finish.

Now it is interesting the reactions we get from our audiences. So far it has been mostly positive. The project managers tend to see it as another tool in their armoury, but ...

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In my opinion one of the best blogs on the web is Better Projects by Craig Brown; closely followed by Impacted Nurses by Ian Miller. The content on both sites is quite different, but always entertaining and informative. I think Craig is about to be challenged by Pat Byrne's Knowing Projects . Pat has been threatening to enter the blogosphere for some time, so I am really pleased to see he has finally found the time.

His second entry is called "A Melody not a Hip=Hop (01) ". Now I suspect my son or daughter, who like rap and hip hop may not like his metaphor, but it resonates with me. Pat says hip hop is "blocky" - that is to say each musical phrase it is not connected in a smooth way. He says the same about two project methodologies - PRINCE2 and PMBOK. To quote Pat: ...

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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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Visualising Collective Knowledge to Understand a Portfolio of Projects . A presentation to a group of Defence scientists from Australian, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States in September 2008. The presentation has an Operations Research focus. Operations Research is the application of the methods of science to complex problems arising in the direction and management of large systems of people, machines, materials and money in industry, business, government and defence. Operations Research seeks to develop a scientific model of the system, incorporating measurements of factors such as chance and risk, with which to predict and compare the outcomes of alternative decisions, strategies or controls.

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Understanding the Complexity of Program Management . A presentation in February 2008 by Patrick Byrne and myself 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 exposed our Project Knowledge Model and Business Network Analysis™ techniques to a public forum of our peers. Between March and July 2008 this presentation in one guise or another has been given to the Sydney and Canberra Chapters of the Project Management Institute, and the Australian Institute of Management.

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Business Network Analysis™: A Department of Defence Case Study . A presentation in August 2008 by Cheryl Durrant and myself to the Melbourne Knowledge Management Roundtable . The presentation outlines an examination of a portfolio of 211 projects, with a value in excess of $40bn.