US$50 Million Expansion Project for Stevens Hospitals

As reported by Earth Times

FOLSOM, Calif. – (Business Wire) Meridian Systems, the Plan-Build-Operate (PBO) technology solutions leader for project-based organizations, announced today that Stevens Hospital of Edmonds, Washington, has selected ProjectTalk^® to standardize its construction management processes. ProjectTalk, Meridian’s online project management and collaboration solution based on Prolog^® software, provides robust functionality in a Software as a Service (SaaS) environment. Stevens Hospital worked directly with P7 Integration, a Meridian Systems Value Added Reseller (VAR), to implement ProjectTalk to manage the upcoming US$50 million expansion project.

Stevens Hospital typically has more than a dozen projects in process at any given time with approximately 10 percent dedicated to new construction. The current expansion project will add a new, two-story Emergency Room (ER) building with 32 ER beds, 30 acute care beds as well as underground parking, totaling 75,000 square feet.

As a public healthcare organization serving Edmonds, Washington and its surrounding communities, Stevens Hospital worked with P7 Integration’s professional services to implement ProjectTalk. The online project management solution is designed to manage complex capital projects more effectively, improve construction project accountability and provide the visibility needed for an expansion project of this size. P7 Integration sells the Prolog suite of applications and provides implementation, training and consulting services.

“The hospital’s goals for the implementation included standardizing on one centralized location for all project data, increased project team collaboration, ability to access current project data at any time and status updates for key personnel,” said Stefan Rehnfeldt, Stevens Hospital’s construction manager. “ProjectTalk is a crucial system for effectively managing vast amounts of information to keep the project on track. In addition, we are using ProjectTalk to successfully manage schedule tasks, project budgets, and document control.”

Read the full story here…

PRINCE2 – 2009

London, United Kingdom, May 29, 2009 –(PR.com)– Project management training and practice is about to undergo a fundamental change. PRINCE2, the most widely recognised professional project management certification in the UK and in Europe, has just undergone its first major refresh.

On 16 June 2009 the PRINCE2 2009 launch party will release three new core PRINCE2 manuals, new PRINCE2 examinations and a modern, stream-lined project management framework.

Changes will include scrapping the wordy, prescriptive detail of PRINCE2 2005, in favour of a more lightweight, generic project management method. Alongside the core PRINCE2 2009 manual will be a high-level guide aimed at members of the project board, who need a basic grounding in PRINCE2, but not the detailed understanding provided by the PRINCE2 Practitioner course.

Perhaps most exciting will be the launch of the PRINCE2 ‘Knowledge Centre’, an online PRINCE2 project management resource. The Knowledge Centre will include PRINCE2 templates, checklists and tutorials available for all PRINCE2 practitioners to download.

Knowledge Train, a leading PRINCE2 training organisation, has recently announced that the new PRINCE2 examinations will be available from the beginning of July 2009, although the old exam will still be available at student request.

Simon Buehring MD of KnowledgeTrain says: ‘Giving students the choice to decide their own PRINCE2 course and exam structure is a priority at Knowledge Train. All students will be provided with the up-to-date PRINCE2 2009 official manual (Managing Successful Projects), but both old and new exams will be available throughout the overlap period.”

For more information about PRINCE2 certificates and project management training-courses, please visit the http://www.knowledgetrain.co.uk website or call KnowledgeTrain on 020-7148-5985.

Brown Bag Sessions at the Start of your Project

While there are a number of ways to engage in knowledge sharing one of the most powerful ones are of course the Brown Bag Session.

Brown bag seminars are generally offered to update the researching community about ongoing research. Usually held by schools and universities and governmental institutions, they involve lectures, presentations, or talks by researchers, mostly professors about their ongoing research. Professors may visit from other universities to talk about their research.

Brown bag seminars normally run an hour or two. Originally they were scheduled around lunchtime and participants were encouraged to bring their own lunch in a bag, explaining how the practice got its name. – Wikipedia

Why do this?

While there is no doubt that formalized learning, like trainings,  contribute heavily towards professional growth within an organization, however, the single biggest learning tool at our disposal is on-the-job learning. This allows people to leverage existing processes to create a structure around the way they work, while enabling a level of flexibility and creativity. The benefits of this approach would lead to new ways of successfully capturing, storing and share of tacit knowledge. Eventually leading to changes being made to existing processes, introducing new ones and in some cases doing away with the old.

Face-to-Face sessions are always important when it comes to knowledge sharing, this is because there is only so much knowledge a document can impart. Creating a platform which allows people to engage with one another is a very powerful tool.

How would you do this?

At the start of every project team members should be encouraged to present thoughts and ideas based on there previous experience and allow other team members to ask questions.

Some benefits of this approach are:

1. Allows the project manager to get a better understanding of his team and figure out where best to user them
2. Allowing team members to get to know one another.
3. Creating a platform that enables team members to showcase their knowledge and expertise .
4. Ensuring that knowledge and Best Practices from previous projects are re-used.
   

Articles from Here and There

I came a cross a few interesting articles that i though might be of value to some of you out there… The first one is about “Asymmetry of Knowledge Spillovers Between MNCs and Host Country Firms” from INSEAD and the second on “Why commercial Wiki’s don’t work” from the CNN money website.

Asymmetry of Knowledge Spillovers Between MNCs and Host Country Firms

“Multinational companies (MNCs) invest abroad for many reasons, but invariably the quest for knowledge and information will be a part of the mix. In this paper, shortly to be published in the Journal of International Business Studies, Jasjit Singh, Assistant Professor of Strategy at INSEAD, uses patent citations from 30 countries to explore whether the flow of knowledge between a MNC and host country is one-sided, or if everybody wins.

Global economic growth is highly dependent on the diffusion of knowledge around the world, but it rarely comes in a form that can be easily transferred, such as a blueprint or an engineering diagram. Practical skills such as management, distribution and marketing know-how are just as important to growth.

To gain these tacit skills, many countries focus on attracting foreign direct investment, developing incentives intended to encourage multinational companies to establish subsidiaries and work with local companies. But while these local subsidiaries can be a significant source of knowledge for the host country, they also provide a very effective mechanism whereby the MNC can access host country technology. As a result, technologically advanced countries may fear that such subsidiaries gain significantly more than they contribute in terms of knowledge, and that foreign direct investment may come at a cost.”

Why commercial Wiki’s don’t work

“(Business 2.0 Magazine) — Nowadays, the all-powerful Web user, recently anointed as Time’s Person of the Year, is both creator and consumer of every last bit of content at some of the Web’s fastest-growing destinations. Witness the success of Flickr (the photo-sharing site), YouTube (the video-sharing site), Deli.cio.us (the bookmark-sharing site) and Wikipedia (the knowledge-sharing site).

This naturally has gotten a lot of large companies interested in the idea of outsourcing their content to the Web crowd, or “crowdsourcing.

At the beginning of February, for instance, Penguin Books – one of the biggest names in the global publishing industry – launched a month-long, publicity-soaked project that attempted to get Web surfers to create a novel. The idea seemed destined to belong in the Web 2.0 hall of fame (or shame), as the most audacious (or most arrogant) use of crowdsourcing ever.

And eighteen months ago, the L.A. Times started a Wiki to open up its editorial page content to user-editing. (Wiki software allows a lot of people to edit the same document simultaneously, as with Wikipedia’s encyclopedia entries). In January, Amazon (Charts) launched its “Amapedia” in a bid to create product pages that could one day replace, or at least enhance, Amazon’s product descriptions. Penguin opened up its Wiki novel at amillionpenguins.com in February.”

Knowledge in Projects

Organizations are growing quickly. mergers, acquisitions and attrition are just some of the challenges to overcome when trying to maintain a knowledgeable workforce.

Companies battle everyday to maximize the capture of tacit and explicit knowledge from their employees and have come up with a number of ways to do so. Collaboration tools, knowledge maps , communities of practice, content management tools, after-action reviews and lessons learned sessions are just some of the methods organizations have devised to counter knowledge attrition.

No single approach however is enough to ensure that knowledge is retained, a mix and match of approaches is required. Though the bottom line is this, unless an organization’s culture is geared towards sharing knowledge, creating systems and processes to enable the sharing of knowledge is a moot point.

These approaches can be followed within the a project as well and become essential tools you , as a project manager, can use to your advantage in running a successful project.

The After-Action review : This is a strategy that has been adopted from the military. Often after an engagement the team will sit down together and go over what occurred, analyzing strengths and weakness. This is an excellent feedback mechanism to promote learning within the team. On a large scale, trends and patterns can be observed by comparing multiple groups, allowing best practices and lessons learned to be replicated across teams.

Communities of Practice: Is one of the simplest ways of connecting people who need knowledge with the groups that have it. Communities of practice are an excellent way to collect and disseminate information to a large audience. In order to maximize the use of a CoP a careful balance of leadership and freedom needs to be given to the community to promote sharing of ideas and knowledge, as a lack of leadership or direction could seriously damage the usefulness of the CoP in the long run.

Expert Directories : Another great way to tap into the tacit knowledge that exists in the organization – the expert directories is a method by which people can interact directly with people considered Subject Matter Experts ( SME’s ) . This however requires voluntary participation by the experts as it requires them to devote time from their busy schedules to address questions that do not benefit them directly.

Information Repositories : The simplest method of extracting and storing explicit information is the information repository. In its most basic form is a large folder with information stored in some sort of a structure. Advanced information repositories or content management systems use meta-tags and taxonomy structures to organize information for the end user in such a way as to provide the maximum value. By creating processes around the system, organization can ensure that all explicit information find’s a place somewhere in the application. It also acts as a medium for the transition of tacit knowledge to explicit.

These are just some of the methods that you could use to promote knowledge sharing and transfer in your organization or project. Keep in mind however that true knowledge retention is a daunting task and unless you have a clear approach mapped out it could lead to some serious complications.