Keywords

1 Introduction

A complete and inclusive project knowledge management archetype has been attempted several times before; some of the most notable examples include Gasik (2011), Koskinen and Pihlanto (2008), and Kasvi et al. (2003). Such studies, however, readily take the well-acquainted concepts of organisational knowledge management and absorb them into a project management framework. There are thus hardly any foundational differences between managing knowledge in projects and managing knowledge in organisations.

There are several reasons why project knowledge management is entangled with organisational knowledge management. Perhaps, though, the most evident of them is that at the fundamental level of knowledge management, there is a highly influential organisational knowledge management paper that arguably popularised the whole field. Written by Ikajiro Nonaka and published by the Harvard Business Review in 1991, the Knowledge-Creating Company lays down the basics of knowledge management in organisations. These basics, from ‘knowledge dimensions’, to ‘knowledge management processes’, and to ‘knowledge transformations’, indiscriminately infiltrate the project knowledge management field. Exploring a knowledge management discipline idiosyncratic to project management can be potentially theoretically and empirically rewarding to managing knowledge in projects in particular and to the field of knowledge management in general.

The proposed ‘Knowledge-Evolving Project’ is thus meant to replace the Knowledge-Creating Company as the cornerstone upon which a complete knowledge management discipline distinctive to project management can be built. Simply put, the Knowledge-Evolving Project is an inverse of the knowledge-creating company. While the knowledge-creating company encourages a typical organisation to utilise knowledge and knowing to explore beyond constraints to engulf more markets and industries, the inverse of that, the Knowledge-Evolving Project, encourages a typical project to utilise knowledge and knowing to effectively and efficiently exploit predefined constraints to meet on budget, time, and scope. The word ‘typical’ here is italicised for a reason; it is meant to describe a classical modernist definition of projects and organisations, during which time each were clearly distinctive.

The objectives of this research paper are straightforward: (1) to untangle project knowledge management from organisational knowledge management, (2) to introduce a new knowledge management doctrine idiosyncratic to project management, and (3) to provide guidelines and pathways to further develop this project knowledge management doctrine. Accordingly, this paper is divided into three main sections: the first section will undo the theoretical entanglement between project knowledge management and organisational knowledge management and by extend pave the way for the doctrine of the Knowledge-Evolving Project; the second section will strengthen the Knowledge-Evolving Project doctrine by unpacking the resulting practical model; and the final section will present ideas and pathways for further research.

2 Unknotting Project Knowledge Management from Organisational Knowledge Management

2.1 A Project or an Organisation?

Project management is often celebrated as a modern era institution, but the fact remains that the ancients weren’t exactly unaware of its methods and techniques. Some of the amazing wonders of ancient civilisations such as the Gardens of Babylon, the pyramids of Giza, and the Colossus of Rhodes were project-based construction activities. Project management as we know it today could be traced back to Henry Gantt and Frederic Taylor who introduced the elements of science into management techniques during the early 1900s. Besides scientific models such as PERT analysis and the Critical Path Method, the classical modernist era of project management determined its identity by the iron triangle of budget, scope, and time. Perhaps the most significant event that solidified the identity of the project management discipline is the formation of project management professional associations such as the PMI Project Management Institute and APM Association of Project Management.

During the postmodern era of the 1960–1990s, the discipline of project management was permeable to the newly emerging social approach of management in business studies and economics such as organisational behaviour, strategic management, and game theory. As a result, project management was becoming more complex in theory and practice as it pushed its identity borders. It was during this era that the concept of ‘projectification’ and the ‘project-based organisation’ became common knowledge. Project management continued to push its boundaries, covering operations that used to be beyond its reach – horizontally stretching from pre-planning to post-completion, and vertically zooming outwards from project programs to project portfolios (Morris 2013). After the 1990s, during the early post postmodern era, a new school of thought began redefining the very identity of project management by challenging the iron triangle constraints. The definition of project management was gradually changing from ‘a temporary endeavor’ to ‘a temporary organisation’ (Winter et al. 2006). This approach, popularly known as the ‘Scandinavian Turn’, is being championed by many high-profile thinkers of project management such as Hodgson and Cicmil (2016), Jacobsson et al. (2016), and Svejvig and Grex (2016), (see Table 1).

Table 1 Project management through the ages
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While this expansion is exciting and promising, project management as a discipline is losing its clearly bounded identity. It is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate between a project and an organisation. The project in the organisation perspective (Anderson 2010), the project-based organisation (Prado and Sapsed 2016), and the projectification of organisations (Packendorff and Lindgren 2014) are blending organisations and projects in theory and practice. Thus, investigating a knowledge management subject matter exclusively idiosyncratic to project management is already a doomed mission should the investigation adopt the post postmodern or the postmodern definition of projects and project management. The first step to approach this mission is therefore to adopt the classical modernist (typical) perspective that clearly and precisely differentiates projects from organisations. Thus, a project here is defined as the temporary endeavour with a predefined constraint of time, scope, and budget (PMI 2013). Projects are typically unstable, terminal, and operate within a fluctuating environment and wrestling with constraints. An organisation on the other hand is an institution that is typically lasting, mostly stable, and works within a routine environment.

2.2 Knowledge Dynamics in Projects and Organisations

The second step is to identify where the characteristics of knowledge activities in projects and knowledge activities in organisations diverge. It is at this point of divergence that a knowledge management discipline unique to either fields can be identified. Fortunately, because organisational knowledge management already has a doctrine – Nonaka and Takeuchi’s (1995) The Knowledge-Creating Company – this task is made substantially easier. We know from Nonaka & colleagues’ writings (Nonaka and Von Krogh 2009; Nonaka and Tomaya 2005; Nonaka and Nishiguchi 2001) that individuals in a typical organisation are encouraged to come up with innovations that destabilises the monotonous environment and induces change. It is only through this novelty of knowledge creation that organisations can push its constraints outwards to engulf more industries and markets and become more prosperous and powerful. In organisational learning, there is a term for such a knowledge dynamic; knowledge exploration. Knowledge exploration is the dexterity of rethinking away from established knowledge in previously unanticipated ways (Hatch and Cunliffe 2013).

On the other hand, individuals in a typical project are encouraged to specialise in and build on the full knowledge predefined at the project outset to calm the fluctuating environment and induce stability. It is only through this novelty of evolving the knowledge established at initiation to encounter unforeseen opportunities and risks that projects can meet their predefined constraints efficiently and effectively. Again, in organisational learning, there is a term for such a knowledge dynamic; knowledge exploitation. Knowledge exploitation is the dexterity of using the existing knowledge base to fully develop and evolve said knowledge for the application it was meant to address (Hatch and Cunliffe 2013).

So it would seem that while innovative exploration overtakes innovative exploitation in organisations, innovative exploitation overtakes innovative exploration in project settings. The correlation between the knowledge dynamics of an organisation and a project is thus an inverse function; if one is represented as a spiral that circles outwards to explore more markets and more industries, the other should be represented as a spiral that circles inwards to exploit the predefined knowledge and meet the budget, time, and scope constraints. The knowledge dynamics of each formulate the basic theoretical background upon which knowledge management should be built. The Knowledge-Creating Company does just that – it adopts specific knowledge practices and processes that are associated with knowledge exploration. Likewise, the proposed Knowledge-Evolving Project should adopt specific knowledge practices and processes that are associated with knowledge exploitation.

2.3 The Epistemology of Tacit Knowing

The third and last step to untangling project knowledge management from organisational knowledge management is subscribing project knowledge management to a different epistemological perspective than the one assumed by organisational knowledge management. This step is important because the current literature on organisational knowledge management is struggling with the philosophical complexities, ambiguities, and shortcomings of the concept of ‘tacit knowing’.

First introduced by Hungarian-British chemist turned epistemologist – Michael Polanyi –, tacit knowing refers to a type of knowledge best explained in his own words: ‘we know more than we can tell’. Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) explain that where tacit knowledge is the kind of knowledge that is near impossible to articulate, ‘explicit’ knowledge is the kind of knowledge that is easily expressible in language. They then continue to demonstrate how subjective tacit knowledge can be externalised into objective explicit, and then internalised back into subjective tacit. The problem here is that all explicit knowledge is tacitly rooted (Polanyi 1969). After all, how can knowledge exist independently of the conscious knower(s)? This makes the concept of ‘knowledge transformation’ from one form to another very problematic (Crane and Bontis 2014; Garrick and Chan 2017; Ribeiro, 2013). Nonaka and colleagues’ replies to criticism (Nonaka and Nishihara 2018; Nonaka and Von Krogh 2009; Nonaka et al. 2014) introduced even more complexities and philosophical ambiguities.

This problem could be solved by substituting ‘transformation’ with ‘utilisation’. This means that what seems to us like transformation from one form of knowledge to another is actually one form of knowledge being utilised to enhance the epistemological action of the other. So, for example, one can use the explicit knowledge publicly available about the mechanics of engines to enhance the creative application of their tacit knowledge to accelerate the production line of car engines. No transformation occurs here, only utilisation and enhancement. This idea dissolves all the philosophical complexity associated with tacit knowing by moving away from knowledge ontology to knowledge application.

2.4 The Knowledge-Evolving Project Emerges

The discussion of the previous three subsections has produced a new construct of project knowledge management that is idiosyncratic to project management. Projects are temporary endeavours limited in time, scope, and budget. In project environments, knowledge exploitation overtakes knowledge exploration to induce stability to fluctuations. Thus project knowledge management is the utilisation of explicit or tacit forms of knowledge to enhance the epistemological action of other explicit and tacit forms of knowledge in project environments to meet projects’ constraints. This is the Knowledge-Evolving Project (Table 2). The next section will unpack what this really means in practice.

Table 2 The knowledge-evolving project and the knowledge-creating company
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3 The FRDA Model of the Knowledge-Evolving Project

Nonaka and Takeuchi’s (1995) knowledge creation model of the Knowledge-Creating Company is called the SECI model. SECI is an acronym for the knowledge processes of Socialisation, Externalisation, Combination, and Internalisation. Socialisation describes epistemological practices such as experience, experimentation, and observation to transform the tacit knowledge of individuals to the tacit knowledge of other individuals; Externalisation describes epistemological practices such as discussion and dialogue to transform the tacit knowledge of individuals to explicit knowledge of groups; Combination describes epistemological practices such as documentation and information technology to transform the explicit knowledge of groups to explicit knowledge of other groups; and finally, Internalisation describes epistemological practices such as training and mentoring to transform explicit knowledge of groups to tacit knowledge of individuals. For an organisation to be successful, practitioners need to move in this order and then back to Socialisation. It is important to move in this order so that effectually the epistemological action here is knowledge exploration. This order of movement is represented by a spiralling circle starting with Socialisation of individuals and forever expanding outwards for the lasting organisation to dominate more markets and industries.

A proposed knowledge evolution model of the Knowledge-Evolving Project should effectually induce the epistemological action of knowledge exploitation of predefined complete knowledge. Since knowledge exploitation is an inverse of knowledge exploration, all one must do is invert the SECI model. The proposed FRDA model is just that – an inversion of the SECI model: (1) where SECI’s spiral starts with tacit knowledge of individuals, FRDA’s spiral starts with explicit knowledge of stakeholder groups; (2) where SECI’s spiral goes forever for a lasting organisation, FRDA’s spiral terminates at the centre point where the project is complete; (3) where SECI spirals outwards for knowledge creation, FRDA spirals inwards for knowledge evolution; and (4) where SECI’s spiral starts with incomplete partial tacit knowledge, FRDA’s spiral starts with a complete set of explicit predefined knowledge.

FRDA is an acronym for the knowledge processes of Formalisation, Realisation, Deconstruction, and Assimilation. Formalisation describes epistemological practices such as identification, codification, authorisation, and information technology that utilises the explicit knowledge of groups to enhance the explicit knowledge of other groups; Realisation describes epistemological practices such as implementation and application of predefined knowledge into reality that utilises the use of the explicit knowledge of groups to enhance the tacit knowledge of individuals working on their particular parts of the project; Deconstruction describes epistemological practices such as creativity, innovation, sense-making, and breakdown of predefined knowledge so that it is malleable enough to confront the unforeseen risks and opportunities of reality that utilises the use of tacit knowledge of individuals to enhance the tacit knowledge of other individuals; and finally, Assimilation describes epistemological practices such as knowledge updating, modernisation, and restructuring of the predefined knowledge that utilises the use of tacit knowledge of individuals to enhance the explicit knowledge of groups. For a project to be successful, practitioners need to move in this order and then back to Formalisation. It is important to move in this order so that effectually the epistemological action here is knowledge exploitation (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
A 2 by 2 matrix plot of the utilization and enhancement of explicit and tacit knowledge. It has the following components, formalization, realization, deconstruction, and assimilation in the clockwise order. At the center is a spiral with an arrow pointing clockwise.

The FRDA model

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4 Conclusion and Further Research

This study has only scratched the surface of the Knowledge-Evolving Project and already new directions and ideas potentially significant for management knowledge in projects and knowledge management in general have emerged. The idea that knowledge utilisation substitutes knowledge transformation for example, may be deployed to revise mature knowledge management topics such as boundary objects and the agency of artificial intelligence in new and exciting ways.

For the post postmodern and postmodern thinkers of project management who identify projects as temporary organisations by melting the three classical identifiers of projects – budget, scope and time – with its surrounding organisation or environment, the FRDA model can be used to investigate their theories in new ways by superimposing it with the SECI model. The method and manner with which the superimposition is applied would depend on the subject matter being investigated; FRDA and SECI could be superimposed in series, in parallel, or as a decision-making tree.

The FRDA model and its knowledge processes were applied to projects in an ideal and generalised sense. It is hence open for reinterpretation and remodelling to the various dimensions and classes of different project types, such as construction, manufacturing, business re-modelling, and research and development. Similarly, the FRDA model can be repurposed for investigating projects that are defined by their increasing level of agility and adaptability rather than a shift in institutional configuration. Clearly there is much yet to explore and study to create a complete, bounded, and well-defined project knowledge management discipline. The Knowledge-Evolving Project doctrine is merely the cornerstone.