Knowledge Matters™

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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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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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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