Global Project Management Culture has been well documented as a complex system. The wicked problem of global transfer of knowledge in project based organizations has been documented in this excellent paper. Knowledge Transfer in Project-Based Organizations: An Organizational Culture Perspective. Mian M. Ajmal, Kaj U. Koskinen. Project Management Journal, Vol. 39, No. 1, 7-15 2008. The Authors Ajmal and Kokinen describe that the biggest problem is not tech but culture. They cite a study that says 80% of the problem of transferring knowledge is cultural. There is a perception among people that holding information is more important than sharing. Perhaps, the most famous example of this is Leibniz and Newton calculus controversy. Newton did not publish his knowledge for 20 years, and it was only under the threat that Leibniz was in the midst of publishing his work that he finally did.
Why do we want to share knowledge? That is an excellent question, and my only answer is the lessons learned from Newton his analogy is “I am only standing on the shoulders of Giants.” Newton Recognizes that it is only by sharing that we can grow. A giant for me is Alexander Budzier, his sharing of his notes for his doctoral thesis is an inspiration for me. Please visit this giant here. http://blog.budzier.com/ I would highly recommend bookmarking his blog in your google reader.
So back to the wicked problem we are facing. Which is the merging of various project management cultures to facilitate the transfer and most importantly utilization of knowledge. Ajmal and Kokinen cite the best way to increase our success is to Recognize that culture is a living Social System, We must assess this culture and recognize the function of our organizations culture. You can look at the xmind map and you can easily see the obstacles to knowledge culture.
Lets focus on the 12 characteristic obstacles. Knowledge is messy, self organizing, seeks groups of people, travels on language, carelessness, shape of experiments, does not grow forever, social phenomena, organically, multi-modal, requires flow which to me means velocity. So that is our wicked problem. The requirements to solve the problem according to Ajamal and Koskinen are multidimensional means of facilitating input, effective ways of sorting useful from useless and developing an organizational culture. The best solution would be for us to work together “generative knowledge creation occurs only when people are striving to accomplish something that matters deep to them.” You need to commit to a shared vision of generating and sharing knowledge. In my previous post we invoked the metaphor of The PMBOK Code the Path of Technology and the need for a baseline and how to munge the data, sort what is important and the request for us to work together.
This post is to postulate that we can use the existing technology specifically friend feed as a way to collaborate as an open community.
This is not a call to all gravitate to one system, it is contrariwise. It is a call to all pursue maximum complexity in terms of individual blogs, groups, networks and ways of communicating mind maps, images, videos. It is the Multi-Dimensional requirement of facilitating input. Create an open Project to use Yahoo Pipes in collaboration to open up the velocity while at the same time sorting what is useless. But this will only happen if we Create Culture and Organize and it will only Happen if we Question the Norms.
Thank you for your time!
