Project-based Organizations (PBO) are different from functional business organizations. This difference is due to uniqueness, uncertainty and the complexity of the features of project business. For these reasons, project business requires a different approach to manage their knowledge efficiently. The nature of project business requires that organizations involved in project management must be specialized in knowledge management to efficiently manage its operations if they are to offer a wide variety of products or services to their customers.
Knowledge Management (KM), in its own right in organizations, provide a base for competence growth. Therefore, to improve the sustainable competitiveness, well-organized knowledge management within project-based organizational network is strategically important. Nevertheless, though the benefits of knowledge management have long been realized, the effectiveness of knowledge management varies considerably among organizations. The ability and practice of how project-based organizations manage what they know, are often constrained by their capabilities to value, create, share and absorb knowledge. Therefore, how PBOs organize to utilize and integrate their dispersed knowledge becomes important.
However, KM in project-based organizations is not an easy task because project members are often a combination of diversely skilled people with several cultural backgrounds working together for a specified period of time, and it often includes members who have never worked together earlier and do not expect to work together again. Therefore, this article argues how understanding cultural aspects can be supportive in adequately managing knowledge in project-based organizations. |
