Why Implement a Project Knowledge Office

Risks in projects, regardless of context, size or technology, have a common thread. The chief project risks are often the fundamental reasons why projects fail. They are many and varied, with some more important than others. However, evidence shows, and the project management literature states, many of the reasons for project failure include, but are not limited to:

• Lack of agreed vision or outcome for the project.
• Scope and direction changes in the project.
• Difficulties in implementing a project due to conflicting priorities and limited budgets or fixed budgets.
• Poor planning of the project due to the poor project management skills of the team, or lack of time or leadership.
• Poor communication between project customers, system users, project implementers and other stakeholders. This leads to different expectations, 'surprise' outcomes, lack of 'buy-in' from stakeholders and generally poor relationships.

What is a Knowledge Productivity Office?

A Knowledge Productivity Office (KPO) or a Knowledge Management Office (KMO) is responsible for defining, designing, implementing and otherwise managing the organisation’s knowledge management system in a holistic, prioritised and financially prudent way and in compliance with the CIO’s (or equivalent) policy and broader standards of good or mandated business practice to enable and support the processes and core business of the organisation and the organisation’s people to add value to that core business.

HolisTech® uses the following knowledge productivity principles in all of our assignments:

• Principle 1 - Individual and collective discipline is required to follow organisational process to achieve business objectives.
• Principle 2 - The organisation’s outputs drive data and information production and management, including its storage.
• Principle 3 - Data and information are created once and used many times.
• Principle 4 - Data and information exist in one location, wherever possible and practical.
• Principle 5 - An open data and information architecture is used to facilitate collaborative work.
• Principle 6 - A cradle to grave approach is employed for data and information for every project and initiative.
• Principle 7 - There are multiple access paths to data and information.
• Principle 8 - Data and information management, production processes, and tools are standardised wherever possible and practical.
• Principle 9 - Data and information matures over time.
• Principle 10 - Data has a visible quality attribute (meta-data).
• Principle 11 - All data and information is owned by the organisation, rather than the individual.

Introduction

TARDIS is the knowledge management system within the Australian Defence Force’s Capability Development Executive . TARDIS was designed and implemented by HolisTech® Pty Ltd  and won the actKM 2004 Combined Cultural and Technical Silver Award . The scope of TARDIS is significant as it truly addresses all dimensions of a knowledge management system - people, process, technology and content. TARDIS is first and foremost a soft system of integrated components comprising people solutions through TARDIS Working Groups, process through TARDIS Process, and technology through various applications like ComWeb® , Telelogic DOORS® and Microsoft® Office .

What is a Policy Relationship Map?

A policy relationship map uses the business network analysis methodology to elicit the capacity of an organisation to effectively engage in its activities. It provides the ability to examine quantitatively, qualitatively, and graphically macro linkages between nodes, where nodes are documents, policies or even business functions. A connection between two or more nodes means there is some sort of relationship and information should be consistent between them.

We have solid competencies in  knowledge management, although we prefer the term knowledge productivity. For us knowledge productivity is a disciplined, deliberate, purposeful, and conscious method to manufacture knowledge from data, information and experience. We use a set of guiding principles and our own holistic knowledge-based approach to integrate tools, techniques, and strategies to retain, organise, share, analyse, improve, and apply business expertise. This approach, coupled with some innovatively used tools, allows us to approach assignments in a robust and consistent way to meet our client's needs.

A short while back, I was asked by a business colleague to assist in providing an insight into how an organisation could handle their knowledge asset better and how they could weave a network of advisors and small/medium enterprises.

A short brief on Leveraging Web 2.0 for Government Service Delivery. It was developed to provide a short overview to provide government executives an insight into how Web 2.0 can assist and is also used as a handout for HolisTech's one hour executive overview.

What I am saying is that some sort of "Vehicle" should be used to create or change a "System" ....to move it from one state to another state. Accordingly, a Vehicle manages the transition of a System from an existing state to the required state.

For example this is the sort vehicle/system relationship that can occur:

This concept can be viewed another way - as a chronology or evolution of systems. A system enters its life at some point in time. In the below diagram some have begun their life prior to say, 2006. Others entered their life after 2006.