Level Up Your Project Management Skills: Master the Knowledge Management Systems Efficiently

Knowledge management is a process involving definition, structure, collection, retention, and sharing the experience as well as knowledge of employees within an organization.

This becomes significant as the organizations, projects, and teams evolve their working styles, approach to the business, or even approach to risks and issues. This is collectively called institutional knowledge.

The most basic aim of knowledge management is to enable connecting the people looking for information to the knowledge (either people with the knowledge or the knowledge repository).

Knowledge management is critical in a project because it increases the project manager's ability to increase the team members' productivity, increase customer satisfaction, and contribute to other projects. 

Knowledge management is helpful for the leaders in the organization as it enables them to take effective decisions to impact the bottom line as well as the top line of the organization. 

Knowledge management can be segregated into 3 phases:

• Gathering of knowledge
• Storage of knowledge
• Sharing of knowledge

Information is generated every day by people working solo or in teams.

The information is to be converted into knowledge that can be used to solve problems.

This knowledge is an asset that can save time, energy, money, and frustration when accessed by the right people at the right time.

In order to do this, leaders should develop an environment and culture of expressing, sharing, and receiving knowledge among team members. 

If you can apply the knowledge management methods to project management practices, you can easily improve the overall communication & decision-making. This leads to gradual but definite improvement in project performance. It will increase employee productivity and reduce risks.

Having understood about knowledge management, you would be surprised to know the lack of understanding among professionals about it.

The image here shows a majority of Deloitte survey respondents view knowledge management as sharing or preserving knowledge rather than as creating or deriving value from the knowledge.

Not managing knowledge efficiently on the project can increase the following risks for the project:

• Risk of employee dissatisfaction
• Risk of employee churn
• Risk of low productivity
• Risk of delayed releases
• Risk of low customer satisfaction

Now that we understand what knowledge management is, let’s take a moment to understand the types of knowledge.

There are 2 types of knowledge – explicit and tacit.

• Explicit knowledge is the knowledge that can be easily shared, taught, and documented (aka codified). As an example, how to assemble parts of an engine is explicit knowledge.
• Tacit knowledge is the knowledge that’s gained through experience and pretty much lies in the head of the expert.

It is context-sensitive, and analogical. 

It is hard to codify. 

The only way to share is for the apprentice to work closely with the expert and learn it over time.

Learning the nuances of music, or designing high-converting user interfaces, are a couple of examples of tacit knowledge. 

While managing knowledge, the project manager must focus on gathering and transferring both these types of knowledge in the project, and working with the knowledge repository at the organizational level for storage and distribution.

A project generates so much information and knowledge, of value to the individuals, the project, and the organization.

Knowledge about technology, design, process, and domain can be invaluable in future projects. 

Allowing team members to gather knowledge has a cost associated. Whether you train them, let them learn on the job, or use an organizational knowledge repository to learn from, or allow working with an expert to gain tacit knowledge – it all comes with a cost.

What happens when the team member leaves the project, or worse, leaves the organization?

That’s a strong enough reason for the project manager to spend time and energy on knowledge management.

As per Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends Survey, as many as 52% of respondents state that knowledge management strategies are driven by workforce movement.

The same scenario arises when a team member gets promoted.

When this happens, they need to learn new skills and develop expertise required for the new role. Their availability on your project cannot be guaranteed or even expected.

Such transition can happen smoothly if there is a well-integrated knowledge management process within the project, as well as at the organizational level.

There are more reasons for initiating the knowledge management process.

A merger or acquisition. 

This brings new blood into the organization, and new skills and expertise. It becomes essential to capture that knowledge and also allow the team members to develop rapport among themselves.

Knowledge management process can help with both.

When senior employees retire, so much of their knowledge can leave the company.

With the knowledge management system in place, it is easy to train the new employees joining the organization.

Moreover, a robust knowledge management system can boost the ability of the project manager to make decisions on technology, design, architecture, deployment, and other related areas. 

KnickMilton.com surveyed over 286 people working in various industries and companies located across the globe, involved in knowledge management. 

They reported some of the benefits of knowledge management:

• Quicker access to relevant information
• Shorter time for the new employees to contribute
• Lower operational costs
• Marked improvement in customer satisfaction

Apart from this, there are benefits such as:

• Ability to solve problems quickly, across the board
• Better quality innovations
• Improved communication
• Easier transition towards organizational agility
• Faster decision-making
• Increased productivity and employee satisfaction
• Improved business processes

It has been found that effective knowledge management in an organization increases employee productivity and job satisfaction. 

When they find the information they need quickly and don’t have to disturb their colleagues, they work better with lesser interruptions.  

And just like everything else, knowledge management is not void of challenges.

Defining methods of managing knowledge and encouraging team members to use them goes a long way in building the right culture.

Formal Training and Community of Sharing

Explicit knowledge needs to be shared. And regular training is a way of transferring the knowledge from those that have it to those that need it.

Training may take the form of 1-1 training, 1-many training, mentoring, live training, and recorded training. 

The topics, formats, and frequency of these training will need to align with the project’s needs.

Some companies and projects keep a skill matrix and constantly map team members’ skills to these.

They also have regular evaluation exercises to understand the knowledge gaps and create a training calendar to plug these gaps.

A community that is open to sharing and to learning is essential.

Building such a community is one of the responsibilities of the project manager. And she can do this by striving to build a culture of trust and openness.

When people don’t hesitate to ask for help and don’t hoard knowledge, the community grows into being a supportive ecosystem for the employees to thrive and grow.

Creating Guides, FAQs, Tutorials, Case Studies, Webinars

Consider these as libraries.

In the previous point, we saw the verbal knowledge sharing aspect of knowledge management, and this is all about written communication – capturing and storing knowledge. 

This can be based on text, video, or voice recordings.

The system needs to be able to store and access information efficiently.

Discussion Groups, Intranets, Online & Offline Forums

These communities share, discuss, distill, and deliberate ideas, information, and knowledge. 

These can be online or offline. 

These can be pull based (where information is pulled by the employee, such as a Corporate Intranet) or push based (where information is sent to employees, such as an email broadcast). 

These can be regulated or unregulated, and might need to be moderated.

Such ones provide direct access to experts and can bolster the confidence of junior members to learn and grow.

While these are the knowledge management methods, we need a good and robust knowledge management system. 

There are, of course, limitations. Some of which are:

• Challenges in effectively capturing knowledge, especially tacit knowledge
• Challenges to locate information as the repository grows over a period
• Keeping the knowledge up-to-date, and removing stale, incorrect, or irrelevant knowledge
• Motivating people to seek knowledge, share knowledge, and apply knowledge efficiently
• Selecting the right knowledge management methods
• Integrating knowledge management with current information systems

While these are challenges, there are a few ways to overcome these. Consider the following:

• Make it easier to share, capture, and access knowledge using simpler processes, methods, and technologies
• Increase awareness and benefits of knowledge management in the organization and project team
• Improve the culture of trust, so people find it easy to share what they know
• Create an environment where failure is not admonished, so people don’t fear failure and thus are more open to seek help
• Provide enough budget, and training to use any new knowledge management system

At the least, a knowledge management system is a type of information technology system that allows easy storage and retrieval of knowledge.

These can be:

• Online community forums
• Learning management systems
• Research findings and summaries
• Platforms at the project level and organizational level
• Product knowledge bases and service knowledge bases

How to Apply Knowledge Management in Your Projects?

They say knowledge is power. And not without reason.

The knowledge available at the right time can save the day, increase customer satisfaction, increase revenue, and overall goodwill with your customer.

Having team members with good knowledge increases your confidence level to take up any challenges on the project.

Project management and Knowledge management should go hand in hand to improve the project’s performance.

The project manager takes the central role in applying knowledge management practices, tools and inculcating habits within the team. 

Educate Team Members About the Benefit of Knowledge Management

This includes the willingness to ask for help, the openness to freely share the knowledge, and the ability to apply the knowledge and solve project problems.

Once the team members realize how knowledge sharing can help them do a better job, they will be much more inclined to participate proactively in the knowledge management initiatives. 

Build a Conducive Environment

Educating the benefits to the team members to get their willingness to participate is great. But they need to be supported in doing so.

This can only happen when you build an environment of trust.

An environment,

• That is a non-threatening one
• Where failures are not looked down upon
• Where people are encouraged to seek help

Also, the project manager should ensure that team members realize that knowledge sharing and consumption is a way of growing in their careers. Helping others to succeed is a way to grow themselves.

Encouraging team members to collaborate and cooperate to meet project objectives also gets them to share knowledge freely.

Such an environment is conducive to sharing tacit knowledge.

Set Up the Right Tools

As seen earlier, setting up knowledge management tools is the next step.

The tools should be,

• Simple
• Easy to use
• Enable quick collection, storage, and retrieval

The knowledge in text and audio-video format is to be easier to capture and retrieve.

Set Up Knowledge Management Processes

These involve,

• The process to identify knowledge needs on the project
• The process to identify the gaps in knowledge among members
• The process to fill those gaps through training, mentoring, coaching, or in a group setting.

Incentivize Knowledge Management Activity Participation

It is not enough to have the mechanism in place. 

People need to be incentivized to participate actively.

The incentive could be as simple as access to special knowledge. 

Another way is having knowledge management level KPIs as a way to measure performance.

Assigning specific knowledge management activity responsibilities to different people is also a good way to ensure the smooth functioning of knowledge management initiatives. These roles can be assigned to different team members in a round-robin fashion.

A cash reward isn’t necessarily the right move because the idea is to connect knowledge sharing to intrinsic motivation rather than extrinsic motivation.

Intrinsic motivation is long term, while extrinsic motivation is short term.

When the project ends, the project manager will ensure all project artefacts are stored.

Knowledge is updated in the knowledge repository by the team members.

Process assets such as templates, FAQs, and best practices are updated. 

It is highly beneficial to encourage knowledge sharing across the projects at regular intervals.