FROZEN STORIES - Capturing and Utilizing Frozen Stories for Teaching of Project Managers

Tanja Buttler, Stephan Lukosch, Alexander Verbraeck

2011

Abstract

Learning from projects is one of the major challenges which appears to be critical to consistent success of project-based organizations. To learn from past projects for current problem situations, knowledge and experience often has to be shared across time or space. However, while it seems to be possible to capture explicit knowledge (e.g. about products and technical problems), softer types of knowledge (i.e. knowledge about the processes that a team had deployed to achieve their goals and why these processes seemed to have worked well or badly) are more difficult to retain. By observing how knowledge people like managers or engineers communicate, we have found that they tell stories. Stories are an ancient way to communicate experiences (i.e. direct observations of or participation in events as a basis of knowledge) and are used by todays engineers to convey the challenges and solutions they encountered. Based on these grounds we propose an approach to freeze stories of project managers by capturing (and processing) their stories and thereby opening up an opportunity for sharing these stories across space and time. First trials of this approach are promising: it was easy for project managers to share experiences resulting in rich accounts. In addition, we tested the acceptance and applicability of frozen stories with apprentice project managers. We found that it reminded them of their own experiences and of stories they have heard. Furthermore, it stimulated the exchange of experiences with peers.

References

  1. Argyris, C. (1980). Some limitations of the case method: Experiences in a management development program. The Academy of Management Review, 5(2):291 - 298.
  2. Barron, A. E. (2004). Auditory instruction. In Jonassen, D. H., editor, Handbook of research for educational communications and technology (clone) - a project of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology. Lawrence Erlenbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ.
  3. Brown, J. S. and Duguid, P. (2000). Balancing act: Capturing knowledge without killing it. Harvard Business Review, 78(3):73-80.
  4. Bruner, J. (1991). The narrative construction of reality. Critical Inquiry, 18(1):1-21.
  5. Cooke-Davies, T. (2002). The real success factors on projects. International Journal of Project Management, 20(3):185 - 190.
  6. Gandelman, R. and Santoro, F. (2010a). A collaborative approach to compose training content. In Systems Man and Cybernetics (SMC), 2010 IEEE International Conference on, pages 2880-2885.
  7. Gandelman, R. T. and Santoro, F. M. (2010b). Designing training content through group storytelling. In Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design (CSCWD), 2010 14th International Conference on, pages 689-694.
  8. Grant, K. A. and Qureshi, U. (2006). Knowledge management systems - why so many failures? In Innovations in Information Technology Conference 2006 Dubai, U Arab Emirates, pages 87-91, Los Alamitos, CA. IEEE Press. Innovations in Infor... Innovations in Information Technology Conference 2006, Dubai, U ARAB EMIRATES, NOV 19-21, 2006.
  9. Hansen, M. T., Nohria, N., and Tierney, T. (1999). What's your strategy for managing knowledge? Harvard Business Review, 77(2):106-116.
  10. Jashapara, A. (2004). Knowledge management - an integrated approach. Prentice Hall, Harlow.
  11. Joung, W., Hesketh, B., and Neal, A. (2006). Using' war stories' to train for adaptive performance: Is it better to learn from error or success? Applied Psychology, 55(2):282.
  12. Kelkar, S., John, A., and Duncan Seligmann, D. (2010). Some observations on the 'live' collaborative tagging of audio conferences in the enterprise. In CHI 7810: Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Human factors in computing systems, pages 995-998, New York, NY, USA. ACM.
  13. Lukosch, S., Klebl, M., and Buttler, T. (2008). Facilitating audio-based collaborative storytelling for informal knowledge management. In Briggs, R. O., Antunes, P., and Vreede, G.-J. d., editors, Proceedings of the 14th Collaboration Researchers' International Workshop on Groupware (CRIWG 2008), pages 289-304, Berlin, Heidelberg. Springer.
  14. McDermott, R. (1999). Why information technology inspired but cannot deliver knowledge management. California Management Review, 41(4):103-117.
  15. McDrury, J. and Alterio, M. (2003). Learning through storytelling in higher education - using reflection und experience to improve learning. Kogan Page, London [u.a.].
  16. Neuweg, G. H. (2006). Das Schweigen der Könner - Strukturen und Grenzen des Erfahrungswissens. Trauner Verlag, Linz.
  17. Newell, S., Bresnen, M., Edelman, L., Scarbrough, H., and Swan, J. (2006). Sharing knowledge across projects. Management Learning, 37(2):167-185.
  18. Newell, S., Robertson, M., Scarbrough, H., and Swan, J. (2002). Managing knowledge work. Palgrave Basingstoke, Hampshire.
  19. Nonaka, I. and Takeuchi, H. (1995). The knowledge creating company - how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation. Oxford Univ. Press, New York, NY, USA.
  20. Ochs, E. and Capps, L. (2001). Living narrative: Creating lives in everyday storytelling. Harvard Univ Pr.
  21. Orr, J. E. (1996). Talking about machines - an ethnography of a modern job. ILR Press, Ithaca, NY.
  22. Pelt, T. v. (2008). Building bridges between projects. Master's thesis, TU Delft.
  23. Perret, R., Borges, M. R. S., and Santoro, F. M. (2004). Applying group storytelling in knowledge management. In Vreede, G.-J. d., Guerrero, L. A., and Ravents, G. M., editors, CRIWG, volume 3198, pages 34-41, Berlin, Heidelberg. Springer.
  24. Rickert, A. and Schnalzer, K. (2005). Mediengestütztes Lernne mit betrieblichen Geschichten. In Reinmann, G. E., editor, Erfahrungswissen erzählbar machen - narrative Ansätze für Wirtschaft und Schule, pages 19-35. Pabst Science Publ, Lengerich.
  25. Sage, A. P. and Armstrong, J. E. (2000). Introduction to systems engineering. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester.
  26. Schank, R. C., Fano, A., Bell, B., and Jona, M. (1994). The design of goal-based scenarios. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 3(4):305-345.
  27. Simon, H. A. (1977). The new science of management decision. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs; London.
  28. Spender, J.-C. (1996). Making knowledge the basis of a dynamic theory of the firm. Strategic Management Journal, 17(SUPPL. WINTER):45-62.
  29. Spender, J.-C. (1998). Pluralist epistemology and the knowledge-based theory of the firm. Organization, 5(2):233-256.
  30. Stauffer, D. (1999). Why people hoard knowledge. Across the board, 36(8):16-21.
  31. Totzke, R. (2005). Erinnern - Erzählen - Wissen - Was haben (Erfahrungs-)Geschichten mit echtem Wissen zu tun? In Reinmann, G. E., editor, Erfahrungswissen erzählbar machen - narrative Ansätze für Wirtschaft und Schule, pages 19-35. Pabst Science Publ, Lengerich.
  32. Valle, C., Raybourn, E. M., Prinz, W., and Borges, M. R. S. (2003). Group storytelling to support tacit knowledge externalization. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, pages 1218-1222, Crete, Greece.
Download


Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Buttler T., Lukosch S. and Verbraeck A. (2011). FROZEN STORIES - Capturing and Utilizing Frozen Stories for Teaching of Project Managers . In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU, ISBN 978-989-8425-49-2, pages 120-129. DOI: 10.5220/0003344701200129


in Bibtex Style

@conference{csedu11,
author={Tanja Buttler and Stephan Lukosch and Alexander Verbraeck},
title={FROZEN STORIES - Capturing and Utilizing Frozen Stories for Teaching of Project Managers},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU,},
year={2011},
pages={120-129},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0003344701200129},
isbn={978-989-8425-49-2},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU,
TI - FROZEN STORIES - Capturing and Utilizing Frozen Stories for Teaching of Project Managers
SN - 978-989-8425-49-2
AU - Buttler T.
AU - Lukosch S.
AU - Verbraeck A.
PY - 2011
SP - 120
EP - 129
DO - 10.5220/0003344701200129