The generic goal of the knowledge and learning process is in the development of core competencies to support strategic intent.
Managing knowledge and learning helps the company to own,
Find knowledge
Create knowledge Package and assemble knowledge
Apply knowledge
Reuse knowledge
Changing the unit of knowledge
Changing where and with whom people work
Employing technological enablers
Fig. 2.3 Relationship between knowledge orientation and organizational design.
Source: Davenport, Jarvenpaa and Beers (1996)
control and properly maintain competencies as state of the art, and also helps it to tailor them to specific projects and business initiatives.
The knowledge and learning process is conceptualized to occur at three different levels: individual, team and corporate (or strate- gic). In modern corporate settings some individuals (such as scientists involved in basic research) may learn and create in isolation, but for the most part individual competence enhance- ment occurs within team environments. Teams are organized on a project basis, and teams learn through the experience of com- pleting a project. At completion of a project, experience can be captured and consolidated into the company as part of its corpo- rate intellectual asset (see Figure 2.4). This intellectual asset base can be reused subsequently by individuals and teams to create yet more insight and learning.
Adapting a number of perspectives (Nevis, Dibella and Gould, 1995; Leonard-Barton, 1992; Roth, Kemp and Doug, 1994) the three levels can be viewed structurally to comprise three essen-
Individual learning Project learning
Corporate learning
Fig. 2.4 The three knowledge-learning improvement levels
tial components: the people factory, the project factory and the experience factory.
Organization as people, project and experience factories
Building a knowledge and learning capability demands the reuse of experience and collective learning. This is best achieved by designing two structures to extend upon individual (people fac- tory) learning. The three structures are:
1 People factory. For an organization to be successful over time it must constantly build competencies in its workforce appro- priate to its current and future needs. Knowing its current people competence base and its future needs helps not only long-term planning but also provides guidance to what are the best ways to deploy its human asset base.
2 Project organization. Organizing around a project structure facilitates and capitalizes upon individual learning and skills.
Through the execution of projects the organization can build up an experience resource base.
3 Experience factory. This is a knowledge and learning reposi- tory. As projects are executed the team gains experiences with products, plans, processes and models that have been used in their attempt to achieve project aims. The data, insight and knowledge gathered during the development and execution of a project can be deposited subsequently in the experience fac- tory. Successes as well as failures are useful learning experi- ences. They inform you what worked and what did not. The project organization is thus the supply source for the experi- ence factory. The experience factory transforms insights and learning into reusable units (through the process of analysing experiences) and supplies them back to the project organization (through a process of packaging useful insights and knowledge). Analysis involves examining the experience collected, in order to uncover any genuinely new knowledge. Packaging involves taking the new knowledge and converting it into a usable form. This is achieved through three activities: generalize, tailor and formalize. Generalize means taking the knowledge from its specific context and making it more generic. If this can be done then it makes that specific knowledge available for more general use.
Tailoring is to customize the knowledge packet to the specific needs of a team, unit or individual. Formalizing a knowledge solution involves taking steps to make the discovered new knowledge a standard throughout the organization, because it
is considered to represent best practice. The experience factory can, in addition, provide specific monitoring and consulting support. The experience factory also has a role in keeping the people factory informed about the developing competencies of project team members. The people factory can use this infor- mation as a basis of selecting personnel for future engage- ments.
The experience factory is thus an important part of the knowl- edge organization. It supports reuse of experience and collective learning by developing, updating and providing ‘packets’ of com- petencies. These packages of competencies are built from previous ‘learning and knowledge experience’ gleaned from individuals and teams executing projects. The ‘packets’ can be, utilized later by teams to carry out new projects. In this way the company makes effective reuse of its existing knowledge and also updates its corporate learning as new insights are developed from experience.
Personnel in the experience factory sustain and facilitate the interaction between project team members by:
● saving and maintaining information
● making it efficiently retrievable
● controlling and monitoring its access.
The main products of the experience factory are core com- petencies packaged as aggregates of project development experiences. The company by making these packets amenable can potentially deploy such competencies widely across the organization. The process is, first, one of discovering tacit knowledge and creating new knowledge (via project experience) and, second, one of making knowledge explicit (via the activities of the experience factory). In this interplay (between the individual, the project and the experience factory) a tacit to explicit cycle is constantly turned (Figure 2.5). This interplay facilitates, what Nonaka, terms, the spiral of knowledge creation.
Synergy between the three component structures occurs via the iterations of the knowledge and learning improvement cycle.
While all participants go through the knowledge and learning process cycle at each stage, not all play an equivalent role. At times the project factory takes a lead role, at other times the expe- rience factory and on other occasions, the people factory (see Figure 2.6). The knowledge and learning process cycle occurs in six steps:
Step 1: Understanding. The company builds understanding of the environment, within which it lives. This helps it appreciate what projects it needs to undertake for the company to survive and succeed.
Step 2: Set project plans. The company defines the specific aims in alignment with its broader mission and vision of what the company wants to achieve, given the environment in which it resides.
Fig. 2.5 The inter-linkages between the project factory and experience factory
NoteBold
Fig. 2.6 The knowledge-improvement cycle embedded within the three organiza- tion structures
Step 3: Choose people, processes, methods and techniques and tools. To achieve its goals the company must decide on the ways it is going to achieve them. This means understanding the prob- lems and tailoring strategies to fit the problem.
Step 4: Execution. After formulating methods the company moves to executing its plans. During execution it analyses the intermediate results and asks if it is satisfying the goals and using appropriate processes. This feedback loop is the first part of proj- ect learning.
Step 5: Analysis. After execution of plans is complete the com- pany analyseswhat happened and learns from it. This becomes part of corporate learning.
Step 6: Packaging. The company stores and propagates the resultant knowledge and experience.
Each turn of the cycle should result in better understanding of the organizational context and capabilities. Improved understanding of the environment leads to better articulation of goals and a better deployment of corporate assets. The better the match between the task at hand and existing capabilities, the better the execution. This results in greater efficiency and effectiveness, which is the essence of any knowledge and learning programme.
Each turn either refreshes and rejuvenates existing competencies or builds new ones to be leveraged in the future.
In the initial phases (understand,set goals andchoose process) the operation focuses on planning. Here, the people and project factory take a leading role and are supported by the experience factory analysts. The outcome of these of these phases are:
1 On the project factory side: a project plan associated with a management control plan. (The project control plan describes the project’s goals, phases and activities with the products, mutual dependencies, milestones and resources. The manage- ment control plan indicates the priorities that need to be
‘actioned’ in order to achieve strategic goals.)
2 On the experience factory side: a support plan, which is also associated with the management control framework. (The plan describes the support that it will provide for each phase and activity and expected improvements.)
3 On the people factory side: a project team people plan and com- petency development plan, linked to the management control plan. (For example, the project team plan indicates the avail- ability of people with requisite skills, and how they will come into play at the various stages of development. The people fac- tory role is also to generate and promote newly acquired com- petencies from the experience factory into the workforce.)
In the following step (execute), the operation focuses on deliver- ing the ‘product’ assigned to the project organization. Here, the project organization takes a lead role and is supported by the experience factory and people factory. The outcome of this stage is the development of an ‘experience product’, which is associ- ated with a set of potentially reusable products (and/or ‘part’
packets of the product), processes and experiences.
In the remaining phases (analyseandpackage), the operation concentrates on capturing project experience and making it avail- able to future similar projects. The experience factory has a lead- ing role and is supported by the project organization, which is the source of that experience. The outcomes of these phases are les- sons learned with recommendations for future improvements, and new or updated experience packages incorporating the expe- rience gained during project execution. The experience factory then has the role of communicating and disseminating the new knowledge to other people in the company, i.e. it facilitates knowledge-led organizational core competence building.
The knowledge improvement/learning paradigm is an iterative process that repeatedly attempts to build and reinforce compe- tencies. Through each iteration the organization redefines and improves itself. This knowledge and learning paradigm occurs via three major cycles:
1 The skills cycle is the feedback to the individual. It is the process through which individuals past skills and training, and understanding of what works, how it works from specific training and experience, gets updated via a new project expe- rience. During this process some embedded skills may be made transparent (i.e. become explicit). This expertise and learning needs then to be made more widely available (most typically in the project team environment, but it can occur in other for- mats) to help solve specific business problems.
2 The control cycleis the feedback to the project during the exe- cution phase. It provides analytical information about the pro- ject’s performance at intermediate stages of the development by comparing the project’s data with the average for similar projects. This information is used to prevent and solve prob- lems, monitor and support the project, and realign the project with goals.
3 The capitalization cycleis the feedback to the organization. Its purpose is to understand what happened, how it happened and why it happened. Capitalization involves capturing the experience and devising ways to transfer this experience across application domains. This it does by accumulating reusable experience encapsulated in innovative product,
process artefacts and other outcomes, which may prove useful in solving problems in the future.
Structuring the organization as a knowledge and experience fac- tory around project teams in which peoples’ specific competen- cies can be leveraged and developed, offers the company an opportunity to learn from every project. This way as the com- pany matures, it constantly rejuvenates and reinvigorates itself, with a constant flow of fresh insight and learning. Over the long term, this supports the evolution of the organization from task based, where all activities are aimed at the successful execution of current project tasks, to knowledge and learning capability based. Knowledge and learning based capability endows the company with continuous energy for improvement and change.
In other words it makes it adaptive and resilient to its environ- ment.