Our latest whitepaper shares lessons from applying a community of practice (CoP) approach to encouraging knowledge sharing across a project community. While the underlying research examines multiple PMOs in a large global organisation, the insights are also applicable to the single PMO attempting to promote the sharing of best practices and lessons learned in the project manager community.
The whitepaper gives us some insights into the challenges faced in promoting knowledge sharing, the success factors for the formation of an effective community and how you might recognise that your community is maturing (or not).
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Services (HPES) is a global organisation with over 200 PMOs of various sizes, types and maturity levels. Conscious of the problems of knowledge 'stickiness' (the inability to transfer learning and information across the organisation) and 'leakiness' (learning benefitting the external client but not making it back into the organisation), HPES PMO leaders and senior management agreed that some form of intervention was necessary to improve peer-to-peer visibility and encourage dissemination of innovative practices. This challenge was neatly summed up in a comment from an HPES manager.
