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The Knowledge Management Cycle 55

Box 2.1
A vignette: A typical day in the life of knowledge in an organization

Context: A major international consulting organization wanted to document lessons
learned from its major projects. This represented a fi rst step toward becoming a learning
organization. From a scan of what other similar companies were doing, their competitive
intelligence led them to select the implementation of an after action review (AAR) in the
form of a project postmortem. The AAR was a new procedure and it was initially piloted
with a group of experienced consultants. Project managers who became experienced with
the postmortem were subsequently asked to become resource people for those willing to
learn and try it out. A new role of knowledge journalist was created in order to have a
neutral, objective person who had not been a member of the original project team who
could facilitate the postmortem process and capture the key learning outcomes from the
project. Finally, the postmortem was added as an additional step to be completed by all
project managers before they could offi cially check off that a project was deemed formally
completed.
Knowledge Processing Steps
1. Knowledge capture/creation/contribution An after-action review process is created within
the organization such that at the end of each project, a meeting is held to have project
team members contribute ideas as to what could have been improved.
2. Knowledge fi ltering/selection During the meeting, the facilitator helps establish criteria
for lessons learned such as was it a factor beyond the control of team members (in which
case nothing much can be done in the future to mitigate against this event). Project team
members must reach a consensus on the criteria that will be used to decide which lessons
learned will be documented and why.
3. Knowledge codifi cation The meeting notes are transcribed and the KM team (including
the knowledge journalist) along with the project team agree on how the lessons learned
will be written up (e.g., format, length, classifi cation tags for future retrieval).
4. Knowledge refi nement The KM team then improves upon the original text of the lessons
learned (e.g., sanitizing or removing information that can identify the project and/or the
people involved, abstracting so that the lessons to be learned are more generalized and
therefore applicable to more than one specifi c context).
5. Knowledge sharing The existence of the lessons learned are publicized and made avail-
able to others (may be organization-wide, may be to specifi c targeted groups).
6. Knowledge access The lessons learned are stored in a database with adequate metadata
or tags that will enable easy access and retrieval (e.g., tagging by the type of lesson such
as “ poor team communication, ” by date, by type of project, and other meaningful tags).
7. Knowledge learning Some of the lessons learned are incorporated into an employee
orientation session and others into a project management – training course. In this way,
the material is used to enable role-playing and to provide themes for group discussion. An