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The Knowledge Gap in a Project Team
The Problem
It all seemed so straightforward at the beginning of the project. Sure, there were a lot of features you wanted to build. And, at that time, the team had a clear understanding of how to build them, their sequencing in the roll-out and how to help the marketing department. That is, until a lead person left. Then the new marketing director repositioned the product. He added features that were inadequately researched and discarded many current features. Key product research was coming from an affiliate on another coast. And now, the project is one big mess. And, oh, did I mention, the deadline didn't change!
This story will strike a chord with most project team members. If you haven't experienced this or something very much like it, chances are, you soon will.
What do members of a project team actually do?
Product Managers spend time:
- Meeting with their team members to discuss tasks.
- Collecting and summarizing task status reports.
- Answering questions and clarifying issues.
- Updating management and customers about project progress.
Team members spend time:
- Understanding their assignments.
- Communicating with management about their progress.
- Working on building the products that represent their deliverables.
In business, this last function is considered the most important job of the team. A big key is keeping the flow of knowledge moving throughout the project, with as little friction as possible. If the project team is involved in repairing or tending to the knowledge flow, the chances are, they are experiencing reduced productivity and probably a lot of frustration.
To recap, product development teams experience many challenges in the ways they deal with information and knowledge:
- Team leads and key developers are making decisions based on inaccurate or out-of-date information.
- Team Managers spent an inordinate amount of hours collecting, sorting out, and summarizing weekly status reports.
- Deliverable schedules are often kept in a location separate from the actual task details. Project managers need to know the schedule as well as the task details and history of their development.
- Because of intense specialization and focus, development team members can't quickly and conveniently find information related to their area of responsibility.
- Newly recruited team members have difficulty "hitting the ground running", because the ground they need to stand on, project knowledge, does not exist in any disciplined or organized format.
- Team members who suddenly leave the project will work on their assignments, up until the minute they clean out their desk. There is never any time for proper knowledge transfer to the team or to the replacement worker.
- Discussion threads are great, but they are not related to key project tasks.
- Key deliverables are often at variance with marketing brochures because of poor coordination between engineering and marketing, caused in most part by last-minute changes.
Industry Responses to the Knowledge Gap
Many earlier attempts to apply computer technology to the knowledge gap were ineffective. They may have been focused on parts of the problem that computers don't do well. Or they may have dismissed the all-crucial role of the human in guiding the computer system. In some cases (voice recognition), these truly daunting challenges required several generations of processing gains in hardware.
Different vendors with differing agendas and core competencies have focused current product responses on various aspects of the problem.
Most of these responses have one or more of the following characteristics:
- They do a great job of solving a very narrow, specialized part of the problem.
- They often have a high purchase (development) cost.
- They often require a large investment of time and effort, particularly in a dynamically changing setting.
- They are usually not easy to use. Hence, they demand that the worker adapt himself/herself heavily towards the methods of the tool, rather than complementing natural human ways of working with knowledge.
- They don't scale well in human terms. Increasing complexity and details of the knowledge tends to exponentially increase the demands on maintaining the "database" of the tool.
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