FROZEN STORIES

Capturing and Utilizing Frozen Stories for Teaching of Project Managers

Tanja Buttler, Stephan Lukosch and Alexander Verbraeck

Faculty of Technology Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology

P.O. box 5015, 2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands

Keywords:

Narratives, Storytelling, Project management, Knowledge management.

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 expe-

rience 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.

1 INTRODUCTION

Within project based organizations there is some con-

cern over retaining the knowledge and experiences

gained in a project. Organizations fear to lose knowl-

edge and expertise needed for their next projects re-

sulting in reinventing the wheel and repeating mis-

takes. Knowledge people such as engineers or project

managers use their minds; this means they own their

means of production - when they leave, they take this

means of production with them (Stauffer, 1999). The

work of knowledge people is characterized by an em-

phasis on creativity, use of social and analytical skills

as well as theoretical knowledge (Newell et al., 2002).

Knowledge people apply their skills and experience to

identify and solve problems (Newell et al., 2002) or

to make decisions (e.g. Simon, 1977). With regard to

activities like decision making, innovation or problem

solving in projects their knowledge and experience is

invaluable. They contribute to these activities based

on their experience and vast knowledge base. We can

learn from past experiences and apply them in the cur-

rent situation. Sage and Armstrong (2000) argue for

example that information about past decisions should

inform present decisions. However, to apply knowl-

edge of knowledge people from one project within

new situations in another project, knowledge and ex-

perience often has to be shared across time or space.

This challenge has been tackled within the do-

main of knowledge management. Within this do-

main knowledge can be understood as something an

individual has learned through personal experiences

(Jashapara, 2004); it is shaped by the social reality

of the individual (Spender, 1996; Spender, 1998) and

partially tacit (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995). Knowl-

edge management is about creating new knowledge,

distributing existing knowledge and training (Jasha-

para, 2004; Newell et al., 2002); for some it means

codifying information in databases and distributing

it through the intranet (Hansen et al., 1999), for

others it means searching for and working with ex-

perts (Hansen et al., 1999), and for some it involves

mentoring and informal learning to develop expertise

(Newell et al., 2002).

120

Buttler T., Lukosch S. and Verbraeck A..

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

DOI: 10.5220/0003344701200129

In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2011), pages 120-129

ISBN: 978-989-8425-49-2

 2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

Capturing the knowledge of knowledge people

working on a project and storing it in knowledge man-

agement systems is one of its core tasks. However,

past efforts to capture and reuse knowledge through

knowledge management systems are not as effective

as expected (see e.g. McDermott, 1999; Grant and

Qureshi, 2006). One reason for this lies in the tacit

nature of part of this knowledge. It is therefore difﬁ-

cult to capture and transfer (Neuweg, 2006).

For organizations relying on the execution of

projects this draws a bleak picture. Learning from

projects and exchanging both explicit and tacit knowl-

edge beyond the boundaries of a project has been

identiﬁed as one of the critical success factors for

projects (Cooke-Davies, 2002).

Stories are an ancient way to communicate ex-

periences (Totzke, 2005). Stories can be understood

as sequences of events, communicated verbally or in

written form (Valle et al., 2003). Within this research

we focus particularly on personal, verbally commu-

nicated stories. They are not just about an account

of events, but also also convey cultural aspects (val-

ues, beliefs, norms and cultural practices), personal

perceptions of circumstances or events, examples for

good and bad practices, as well as speculations about

what might have happened (Ochs and Capps, 2001;

Bruner, 1991; Orr, 1996). In addition, stories are

placed into context in order to improve understand-

ing of the audience (Bruner, 1991). When these nar-

ratives are told in a conversation, the teller can adapt

the narrative to the story listeners, e.g. by ﬁlling in the

blanks as necessary (Bruner, 1991; Ochs and Capps,

2001) or by responding to posed questions and chal-

lenges (Ochs and Capps, 2001). Therefore, the story

listeners act as interlocutors who shape the story to-

gether with the primary storyteller.

Under the designation of storytelling, stories are

already purposefully used to elicit written accounts

of experiences shared in a team (see e.g. Valle et al.,

2003; Perret et al., 2004).

Based on these grounds we propose an approach

to freeze stories of project managers, in order to share

experiences across time and space. This approach

consists of the two stages: capturing the experiences

in interviews and processing these interviews in or-

der to prepare the captured experiences for further

use in educational settings. Through this approach,

the storyteller cannot adapt the story to the audience

anymore, or complement the story with experiences

made in other projects. This is what we understand

under ”freezing” a story.

The capturing stage employs interviews (and

therefore an interviewer to interact with) for elicit-

ing the experiences. Another means to capture ex-

periences might be through the aid of a specialized

storytelling tool. This area of research is outside of

the scope of this paper, see e.g. (Lukosch et al., 2008;

Lukosch et al., in press) for some of our research in

this area.

We evaluated the capturing stage by observing

project managers who contributed their experiences

and by analyzing the captured experiences. Early re-

sults show that through the capturing stage it is easy

to share experiences resulting in rich accounts. In or-

der to evaluate the processing stage, stories containing

personal experiences and beliefs were selected and re-

constructed. Finally, we tested the acceptance and

applicability of frozen stories with apprentice project

managers in a ﬁeld experiment. We found that it stim-

ulated them to share their own experiences as well as

stories they have heard.

Within the remainder of this paper we explore the

problem in more depth and present our approach in

using stories to capture experiences, followed by a

ﬁrst exploratory study on how to capture stories in or-

der to get a sufﬁcient result for utilizing the stories in

educational settings. Furthermore, we want to give a

ﬁrst impression on how these stories are received by

apprentices in the area of project management.

2 PROBLEM EXPLORATION

Newell et al. (2006) have conducted interviews in

several organizations on the effectiveness of their

lessons learned efforts. Lessons learned are a com-

mon strategy to transfer knowledge between projects

by capturing lessons and storing these in a database

for others to use. The results of the interviews

are telling. While it seems to be possible to cap-

ture knowledge about products, technical issues and

achievements, softer types of knowledge (i.e. knowl-

edge about the processes that a team had deployed to

achieve their goals and why these processes seemed to

have worked well or badly) are not retained. Sharing

these softer types of knowledge still relied on people

to communicate it personally. Considering the issue

of experts leaving the organization this draws a bleak

picture. The softer types of knowledge are essential

for learning from past projects. However, sharing soft

knowledge through personal communication is not an

option - if people have left an organization for in-

stance, they are not available for this kind of com-

munication any more. Therefore, we have to capture

softer types of knowledge, in order to share it across

time and space.

Telling (and recording) stories might be a way to

address this challenge: Stories are an ancient way to

FROZEN STORIES

- Capturing and Utilizing Frozen Stories for Teaching of Project Managers

121

share experiences. Taking a mainly historical per-

spective, we can observe that in societies where the

technologies of literacy (especially writing and print)

are unfamiliar to most of the population, experiences

and knowledge are shared in two ways: through

(guided) imitation or through verbal communication

- particularly through telling and retelling of stories

(Totzke, 2005). In our own experience, expert project

managers like to share the lessons they learned while

dealing with problems in a project through stories (see

also Section 4.1). Today, technical experts use sto-

ries to talk about their personal experiences, the chal-

lenges they encountered and the lessons they learned

(Orr, 1996). The everyday practice in informal knowl-

edge management further shows that softer kinds of

knowledge are usually communicated in the form of

stories (Brown and Duguid, 2000). This line of argu-

mentation allows us to specify the ﬁrst requirement:

we have to elicit and record stories.

In addition, projects can be complex in them-

selves. Consider for example project managers doing

projects all over the world. They have to deal with

several cultural aspects: the culture at the target site,

the culture of the people working on the project as

well as the culture of the organization. New technolo-

gies or a big scope can add to the complexity of a

project. Every experience gained in such a complex

project is embedded in the context in which this expe-

rience was made. The necessity of providing context

within or together with a story has also been acknowl-

edged in literature, see e.g. (Perret et al., 2004; Valle

et al., 2003). Therefore, captured experiences should

refer to the context in which they occurred.

In capturing personal experiences we not only

have to take into account the needs of the target group

but also have to consider the needs of the experi-

enced project managers. Here, previous attempts to

gather similar experiences in written form have shown

that project managers have little time to write up the

lessons they learned (see e.g. Newell et al., 2006; Pelt,

2008). Therefore, we have to reduce the time a project

manager spends on the process.

2.1 Using Stories for Training of Adults

Stories are also used in educational settings. Within

goal-based scenarios cover stories (often in the form

of case studies) are used to frame authentic tasks de-

signed to acquire skills (Schank et al., 1994). Here,

stories are used to motivate student, not to share softer

types of knowledge across time and space.

McDrury and Alterio (2003) use a storytelling ap-

proach (rooted in constructivism) to reﬂect on and

learn from their own experiences. Their collaborative

approach consists of ﬁve phases: story ﬁnding, story

telling, story expanding, story processing and story

reconstructing. Within this approach learners tell and

listen to stories told by other learners in the same

group. This approach only works when the learners

have direct contact to each other.

There are several approaches using stories as

teaching material. The case method is a teaching

approach confronting students with real world prob-

lems. Argyris (1980) has identiﬁed key features of

this approach: Real world problems are used. The in-

volvement of the teacher is minimized, whereas the

involvement of the learners is maximized with re-

gard to stating their opinions, questioning the views

of others, and making decisions. Here, stories are one

means (among others) to provide information about

the case.

Rickert and Schnalzer (2005) have presented an

approach to use stories of master craftsmen in the ﬁeld

of metalworking to teach journeymen in that ﬁeld.

The stories are edited to ﬁt into a didactic concept

(e.g. problem based learning or case based learning)

and presented in multimedia formats .

There has also been some research on how to

use stories for training ﬁreﬁghters: Joung, Hesketh

and Neal (2006) have compared stories of ﬁreﬁght-

ers about mistakes, some stories describing the worst

outcome, some stories containing near escapes. They

have presented these stories to ﬁreﬁghters and as-

sessed their ability to identify a range of problems

and possible actions before acting. They found that

stories describing the worst outcome had the greater

impact. The goal is to build up expertise of the ﬁre-

ﬁghters and improve their perception of a particular

situation. While all these research approaches pro-

vide some insights into how to use the stories (also

from a didactic point of view), they do not explore

how to get and modify the stories. Furthermore, they

do not focus on verbally told stories.

Gandelman and Santoro (2010a, 2010b) have pro-

posed an approach to capture stories from real world

situations in order to use them in training scenarios.

Their focuses on reports gathered from several people

involved in such a situation and editing the results to

merge them into a story. However, so far there has

been no research on actually using the resulting in a

training scenario.

All in all, stories are used to provide insights

into complex situations, help students to foster mean-

ing and provide motivation. We are of the opinion

that frozen stories are a vehicle to transfer experi-

ences from experienced project managers to appren-

tice project managers.

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122

3 APPROACH

Our storytelling approach aims at supporting the elici-

tation of personal experiences within a project. It con-

sists of two stages: the elicitation of personal views

and experiences through interviews and the process-

ing of these interviews in order to prepare the elicited

stories for further use in educational settings. Further-

more, we have to provide technology support for both

stages.

3.1 Elicitation of Personal Experiences

In order to elicit personal experiences in an efﬁ-

cient manner for the experts involved, we use semi-

structured interviews conducted by experienced inter-

viewers.

Capturing experiences through interviews has sev-

eral advantages. First, interviews reduce the time

a project manager has to spent on telling her sto-

ries. Second, having a person guiding through the

storytelling provides additional motivation to actually

telling the stories. Third, we can build on some of the

characteristics of verbal communication. In short, the

interviews are about personal truth, not about absolute

truth.

An interview can be conducted in face to face set-

tings or via the telephone. In both cases the interview

is recorded resulting in an audio ﬁle. The general

question within the interview focuses on the major

lessons the interviewee has learned within the project,

supplemented by experiences of the interviewee on

some of the issues raised in previous interviews. The

interviewer should prompt for additional details to get

a richer picture, by asking several interviewees about

the same major issues we get multiple views on the

same issues.

Figure 1: Live tagging.

The interview is recorded as a spoken document.

However, while it is easy to scan a text to get an

overview over the content, spoken documents do not

support scanning (Barron, 2004). Therefore, we ask

the interviewer (or an additional observer) to tag the

interview while it takes place (see Figure 1); this tech-

nique is similar to live tagging (Kelkar et al., 2010).

A tag consists of a label and a time index and pro-

vides a rough indication of the topic or interaction

type (e.g. asking a question) within the interview at

a given time. In order to match the recording time

and the internal clock of the tag application we use

a load sound (beep) when we start the tagging appli-

cation (this is similar to the use of a clapperboard in

motion picture production to synchronize images and

sound).

3.2 Processing

Even though eliciting softer types of knowledge

through interviews aims to reduce the time and effort

a project manager spends on the process and provides

motivation to actually tell the stories, the one-by-one

interviews also require a story editor to analyze and

process the interviews. Consider the following exam-

ples:

• The interviewees address multiple issues in one

interview which have to be separated and dis-

tributed to different recipients.

• To highlight a particular connection within a

course it can be enough to use a couple of small

stories serving as examples.

• For a more extensive documentation of one issue

within the project the views of several intervie-

wees have to be combined.

These examples show that there is a gap between the

elicitation of the experiences and the utilization of

these captured experiences—we can not just use the

raw interviews. Even though the exact purpose of us-

ing parts of the interviews differ, there are some com-

monalities when looking at the underlying activities:

the story editor identiﬁes and labels interesting parts

(or segments) of the interviews, links different parts

of the interviews exports results as an audio ﬁle.

The processing phase supports these activities

through three steps:

1. Segmentation of the interviews.

2. Linking of the segments.

3. Merging different segments together.

To assist story editors in the execution of this

process we used the CASTing information system

(Lukosch et al., 2008). CASTing offers functionality

to collaboratively store, mark, tag, link, search, pub-

lish and reuse the audio material. The identiﬁcation of

FROZEN STORIES

- Capturing and Utilizing Frozen Stories for Teaching of Project Managers

123

Figure 2: CASTing (Lukosch et al., 2008).

interesting parts takes place during the segmentation

step. Story editors can segment the audio recordings

by setting marks; each mark is deﬁned by a label and

a exact time position in the interview. In Figure 2 on

the left side you can see a list of audio ﬁles together

with their marks. Two marks within the same inter-

view deﬁne start and end of a segment. The marks

in an audio recording can be used to deﬁne links be-

tween interviews by serving as start or end point for a

link. Based on the marks that are associated with each

audio recording it is possible to link the original in-

terviews without modifying them. The links between

the different audio recordings form a directed graph

(see Figure 2, right side). The nodes in the graph rep-

resent the parts of the interviews, the directed edges

in the graph represent the links between these parts.

Each node is assigned to one audio recording. By us-

ing directed graphs we allow story editors to explore

several alternatives before committing to one of them.

Within the directed graph story editors can select a

single thread and export this threat as a single audio

ﬁle.

The three steps of the processing stage may be ex-

ecuted in any non-sequential order. It is possible to

skip steps or to return to steps in the process. Thereby,

we support a free development of the story. When,

e.g. linking audio recordings the need for an addi-

tional example can become obvious. This example

can be identiﬁed and then directly be linked.

4 EXPERIENCES

In order to test our approach we have employed it

in a major oil and gas company. In the following

we describe our experiences in capturing and pro-

cessing personal experiences of knowledge people in-

volved in the management and supervision of two ma-

jor projects within that company and derive some in-

sights into what went well and which points need im-

provement. Furthermore we report on using some of

the elicited stories as educational material in a formal

training environment.

4.1 Capturing of Personal Experiences

We have carried out the capturing phase within two

projects, one in Russia and one on the Arabian Penin-

sula. Both projects were already running for sev-

eral years and near completion at the time of the

interviews. Within these projects it was important

CSEDU 2011 - 3rd International Conference on Computer Supported Education

124

to gather experiences in time (that is, before peo-

ple move onto the next project or leave the orga-

nization). The personal experiences were captured

through semi-structured interviews focusing on the

lessons learned within these projects. The lead ques-

tion in most interviews was

What are the three major lessons you learned

within this project?

The interviews were conducted by individuals or in

teams; for each of the two projects there was one lead

interviewer. Even though this lead interviewer had

prepared a list of topics he wanted to address most of

these topics were already addressed by answering this

simple question. If necessary, the interviewer would

use this list of topics to ask further questions. All in

all, it was remarkably easy to elicit the experiences of

the project managers through interviews.

Besides, there are other advantages that deserve

mentioning. The time an individual project manager

had to spent on the process lay between 40 minutes

and 2:30 hours (see Table 1), which is quite low com-

pared to the amount of information shared in that

time. For instance, the transcript of the longest inter-

view contained over 20,000 words. Therefore, with

the chosen approach we reach our goal to reduce the

time a project manager has to spent on the process.

We have to point out though, that the time needed

might depend on the interviewer as well. In Rus-

sia and on the Arabian Peninsula two different in-

terviewers were leading the interview. As shown in

Table 1 there is a difference of 20 minutes between

the mean lengths of the interviews and a consider-

able difference can also be noticed when looking at

the minimum (40 min versus 69 min) and maximum

lengths (95 min versus 148 min) of the interviews.

Differences between interviewers include the number

of questions asked in the interview and the number of

verbal supporting cues (like ”hm”).

However, two leading interviewers do not provide

us with sufﬁcient data. Therefore these observations

have to be substantiated through further research.

Table 1: Interviews.

Location Russia Arabian

Peninsula

Number of Inter-

viewees

13 9

Length of inter-

views (Range)

40 min to

95 min

69 min to

148 min

Length of inter-

views (Mean)

69 min 89 min

Total interview

time

≈ 15 hours ≈ 13.5

hours

Furthermore, our approach allows us to elicit sto-

ries (and not just facts) in an interactive way thereby

offering an easy way to share experiences. For ex-

ample, one project manager addressed the learning

aspects of stories as well as motivational aspects for

participating in our research:

I was keen to participate because I very

strongly believe in storytelling. Because sto-

ries they stick and if you can tell a story then

people will remember the story and if in that

story are some points that he can pick up,

which are applicable for their own knowing.

[...] The other element which is important is

that major project teams like mine, they are

isolated. They go on a journey and [...] in my

case it will be 8 years. [...] And the learn-

ing happens during those 8 years and yes at

a certain phase you write them down and - it

should be pulled. That’s why the storytelling

that you invited me to is pulling the informa-

tion and not waiting till the project team writes

it down.

Here the project manager points out that capturing ex-

periences through interviews has the additional ad-

vantage of pulling the experiences instead of just

waiting for them to be delivered.

Finally, during the interview the interviewees felt

free to address any issue they deemed important. Ma-

jor issues were addressed by several interviewees re-

sulting in a rich picture. The interviewees addressed

questions and opinions that are not part of the lessons

learned approach (within that company), e.g. they

highlighted drawbacks of solutions, they brought up

untried ideas, addressed unresolved problems and

highlighted connecting challenges.

We also identiﬁed additional challenges and lim-

itations: First, even though the interviewees shared

their experiences freely, they also asked the interview-

ers to limit access to some sensitive issues in their sto-

ries. Second, ethical issues are raised when the inter-

viewees share negative experiences they had with em-

ployees of the company. Third, capturing experiences

is not suitable for recreating past events, particularly

when these events had a huge impact on a project.

4.2 Processing

In order to evaluate our processing step, stories con-

taining personal experiences and beliefs regarding

contracting were selected and reconstructed with the

help of CASTing. Within the processing stage the

story editors were able to identify lessons learned,

heuristics, contextual information, how to do some-

thing and stories about particular incidents. These

FROZEN STORIES

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125

stories within stories were used as illustrations by the

interviewees and proved useful as examples for the

educational material.

Using CASTing the story editors marked small

parts of the interviews and rearranged these parts into

two narratives. These narratives were presented in a

course for novice project managers. The story editors

identiﬁed these parts with the help of the interview-

ers. Once the story editors identiﬁed the parts they

wanted to use, the CASTing support allowed them to

extract these parts, tag them and create a narrative out

of it. However, the identiﬁcation itself proved to be

quite time consuming and cumbersome. This experi-

ence shows the need for suitable tool support: through

intense discussion with the story editors it became ev-

ident that, as a ﬁrst step, the accessibility of spoken

documents needs to be improved.

4.3 Evaluation in a Training Program

for Project Managers

The stories were employed in a formal training envi-

ronment within the oil and gas company to test the ac-

ceptance and applicability of stories to convey knowl-

edge and to contribute to continuing professional de-

velopment.

4.3.1 Educational Material

In order to evaluate the stories with regard to context

as well as technical quality we designed an interven-

tion utilizing selected story parts relating to contract-

ing issues (speciﬁcally remuneration schemes). The

stories were reconstructed from interviews with two

senior project managers each responsible for one sub-

project. For each project manager one ﬁle (3 min

and 1 min length respectively) was created, contain-

ing experiences within their own sub-project as well

as their personal views on the other sub-project, to-

gether with speciﬁc examples underlining their posi-

tion. When selecting the stories we paid special at-

tention to other topics relevant in project management

(e.g. safety, scope change). In addition to the stories

themselves we assembled contextual information on

the main project and on the project managers; this in-

formation was presented separately from the stories.

4.3.2 Setting and Participants

The reconstructed stories were employed in two con-

tinuing education courses for professionals within the

organization. The courses addresses beginners in

project management and took place in The Nether-

lands and in Brunei (see Table 2 for details about the

participants).

Table 2: Participants.

Location The Netherlands Brunei

Number of Partic-

ipants

23 24

Participants with

prior knowledge

about contracting

13 15

Age (Range) 27 - 49 24 - 52

Age (Mean) 35 35

4.3.3 Procedure

The overall intervention was divided into three parts

and took about 35 minutes. In the ﬁrst part a course

facilitator gave a short introduction on the project.

The ﬁrst audio ﬁle was introduced with some back-

ground information on the project manager and the

ﬁle was played back. The same procedure was fol-

lowed for the second audio ﬁle. Altogether, the

ﬁrst part took 10 minutes. In the second part the

course participants discussed the advantages and dis-

advantages of various remuneration schemes in small

groups and captured their results on a ﬂip chart. This

group discussion lasted about 15 minutes. In the ﬁ-

nal part a plenary discussion was used to debrief the

course participants.

After the intervention we collected feedback from

the participants through a questionnaire containing

both qualitative and quantitative questions (using a 7

point Lickert scale). Here we were mainly interested

in the following two questions:

1. Do the participants perceive the use of frozen sto-

ries about real projects as interesting and relevant?

2. Do frozen stories remind participants of their

own ﬁrst-hand experiences or of stories they have

heard from others?

We also asked the participants what they found good

and how we could improve the use of stories in an

educational setting.

4.3.4 Results

In both locations, we explored how the stories were

perceived as part of the course (see Table 3). The re-

sults show that while 71.1% of the participants sup-

port the use of stories in future courses, 60.0% of

the participants perceived the stories as interesting

and 91.3% perceived them as relevant for the course,

the implementation of using stories in an educational

settings needs improvement with regard to the au-

dio quality and the provided contextual information.

Only 46.8% of the participants considered the context

to be sufﬁcient, and 71.7% found the audio quality

CSEDU 2011 - 3rd International Conference on Computer Supported Education

126

insufﬁcient. We want to point out the discrepancy be-

tween the perception of the audio quality in Brunei

and The Netherlands: while 91.7% of the participants

in Brunei found the audio quality insufﬁcient, only

50.0% of the participants in The Netherlands found

the quality insufﬁcient. This discrepancy might be ex-

plained by the proﬁciency in English in both courses.

In Brunei, the qualitative results showed some support

for using audio or video aids (e.g. subtitles) which

supports this assumption. In addition, several par-

ticipants suggested replacing the audio material with

video.

Table 3: Applicability of stories (The Netherlands and

Brunei).

Item Agree Neutral Disagree

Perceived as rele-

vant for the course

91.3 2.2 6.5

Perceived as inter-

esting

60.9 28.3 10.9

More stories in fu-

ture courses

71.1 22.2 6.7

Sufﬁcient contex-

tual information

46.8 27.7 25.5

Sufﬁcient audio

quality

10.9 17.4 71.7

In Brunei we added some questions, mainly to

follow up on issues raised during the course in The

Netherlands. We found that 81.8% of the participants

found the stories relevant for their peers, thereby sub-

stantiating the relevance of the stories for beginners in

project management.

Furthermore, we explored the issue of the contex-

tual information by splitting it up into information re-

lating to the narrators of the stories and information

relating to the project itself. While 45.8% of the par-

ticipants found the contextual information about the

persons sufﬁcient, only 34.8% found the contextual

information from the project sufﬁcient. In order to

improve the applicability of stories within educational

settings we therefore have to improve the contextual

information in both areas.

Some participants in The Netherlands observed

that they were reminded of their own experiences.

The results from Brunei show however, that 68% of

the participants are reminded of stories they had heard

before. Only 35.3% are reminded of their own expe-

riences. Even though, 83.3% of the partipants agreed

that their own experiences or that of their peers were

shared during the group discussion; and only 29.2%

found it difﬁcult to share their own experiences. All in

all, this suggests that while experiences were shared

in the group discussion, sharing of own experiences

was somewhat limited. This conclusion is supported

through qualitative results. For instance, one partici-

pant stated

A good discussion amongst the team but

limited to what the team knows and what they

have experienced before. Discussion with a

wider group added more insight but still very

limited as not many of the participants have

encountered contracting strategy.

Table 4: Results Brunei.

Item Agree Neutral Disagree

The stories are rele-

vant for peers

81.8 18.2 0

Reminded of own

experience

35.3 52.9 11.8

Reminded of stories

heard before

68.2 22.7 9.1

During discussion

own experiences

and that of peers

were shared

83.3 8.3 8.3

Difﬁcult to share

experiences during

discussion

29.2 12.5 54.2

Sufﬁcient back-

ground information

on project manager

45.8 29.2 25.0

Sufﬁcient back-

ground information

on project

34.8 26.1 39.1

The qualitative results give some additional in-

sights into effects of the intervention. First, the par-

ticipants appreciate the real life experiences. For ex-

ample, one participant stated

We get to understand how method succeed or

failed in real life situation.

Second, the participants gained insights into the con-

tent. One participant stated:

It’s an eye-opener in some ways that reim-

bursable

are good in some situations.

With regard to the two questions posed above, we

can conclude that the course participants perceived

the use of frozen stories as interesting and relevant,

despite the insufﬁcient audio quality. Furthermore,

they are often reminded of stories they have heard

from others, but they are rarely reminded of their own

ﬁrst-hand experience.

Reimbursable is one of the remuneration schemes.

FROZEN STORIES

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127

5 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

WORK

In this paper, we presented an approach to support

the elicitation and processing of stories and experi-

ences of project managers, thereby allowing organi-

zations to share rich accounts of these experiences

across time and space. We employed our approach

in two projects of a major oil and gas company. Our

approach consists of two stages, the capturing of ex-

periences through semi-structured interviews and the

processing of these interviews. The capturing stage

allows project managers to freely communicate their

stories and experiences, while leaving room for the

elaboration of untested ideas, unresolved challenges

and drawbacks of tried solutions. The processing

stage builds on a process designed for collaborative

storytelling and features the segmentation of the in-

terviews, linking of various segments and the merging

of linked segments.

We extracted two stories about contracting and

employed these in a formal training environment to

test the acceptance and applicability of stories to con-

vey knowledge and to contribute to continuing profes-

sional development.

Even though our experiences with the approach

show promising results, we want to point out some

limitations and opportunities for future research.

First, it was easy to capture the experiences of project

managers. However, as the target group were project

managers, we might ﬁnd it more difﬁcult to capture

the experiences of other knowledge people like scien-

tists or engineers.

As discussed in section 4.2, the segmentation of

the interviews in the processing stage is still time con-

suming. Therefore, as a ﬁrst step we want to improve

the accessibility of the spoken stories.

Furthermore, the qualitative results from the ed-

ucational setting showed that the exchange of own

experiences was limited during the group discussion.

Apprentice project managers do not have enough own

experiences to draw upon during discussion. In future

research, we intend to investigate approaches to pro-

vide novices and apprentices with a wider base for

discussion, e.g. by instructing participants of a course

to ask colleagues about their experiences in advance

of the course.

Finally, within the domain of knowledge manage-

ment the use of captured knowledge within an organi-

zation often poses a challenge. In our future work, we

will therefore use frozen stories not just in formal edu-

cational settings but also integrate them into the daily

work practices of project managers. We are currently

exploring possiblities to utilize frozen stories within

decision making and problem solving situations.

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