Learning, knowledge-sharing and expertise management in project-based knowledge work

This dissertation examined the question of how a project-based organization manages its knowledge resources and builds up its capabilities. Many technical and professional service firms are project-based. For these organizations, employees' knowledge is an essential resource and a primary source of competitive advantage. Examining how these organizations manage their knowledge resources will provide an understanding of how firms who specialize in knowledge work share knowledge and use it in projects across the organization, in spite of the difficulties associated with learning across non-routine and temporary projects. Three studies were conducted to address this research question.;Study 1 examined whether a project-based organization doing knowledge work can learn from experience accumulated over many projects, where each project addresses a different problem. This study investigated whether different types of experience at the individual, group and organizational levels affect the productivity of an organization doing large-scale software development. A key finding in this study is that project-based organizations face significant challenges in learning and sharing knowledge across projects.;Study 2 and 3 examined the mechanisms organizations use to share knowledge across projects. Two key mechanisms for knowledge sharing are the use of personalization, where knowledge is closely tied to the person who developed it and is shared mainly through direct person-to-person contacts, and codification, where knowledge is codified and stored in databases and documents, where it can be accessed and used easily by employees in a company. Study 2 examined personalization in an organization that deploys its expertise across projects by sharing personnel amongst several projects. This study shows that if organizations do not constrain themselves to locally available expertise but are willing to incur the costs of using virtual teams, they can more effectively utilize the expertise available in the organization, and this can improve the profitability of their projects. Study 3 examined codification in an organization that uses a repository for sharing project documents such as client presentations, project proposals, project report and templates. This study showed that reuse of project documents was more difficult in cases where the knowledge to be shared was complex, and where recipients were unfamiliar with the domain of the project document. Users were able to overcome the difficulties by seeking assistance from the authors of the project documents, and by making use of a shared interpretive schema to guide their understanding and interpretation of it. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...