Authors:
Tanja Buttler
;
Stephan Lukosch
and
Alexander Verbraeck
Affiliation:
Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
Keyword(s):
Narratives, Storytelling, Project management, Knowledge management.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Authoring Tools and Content Development
;
Computer-Supported Education
;
e-Learning
;
Information Technologies Supporting Learning
;
Learning Organizations
;
Lifelong Learning: Continuing Professional Training & Development
;
Social Context and Learning Environments
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 man
agers 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.
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