A project knowledge management framework grounded in design science research

• Author: Cristiane Drebes Pedron,Marcirio Silveira Chaves,Rosana Sue Narazaki
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/kpm.1627
• Date: 01 July 2020
• Published date: 01 July 2020

RESEARCH ARTICLE

A project knowledge management framework grounded

in design science research

Rosana Sue Narazaki

1

| Marcirio Silveira Chaves

2

| Cristiane Drebes Pedron

1

1

Universidade Nove de Julho, Brazil

2

Business School, Pontifícia Universidade

Católica do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

Correspondence

Marcirio Silveira Chaves, Business School,

Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande

do Sul, Porto Alegre 90619-900, Brazil.

Email: mschaves@gmail.com

Knowledge management (KM) dynamics have caused a lack of traceability and loss of

explicit and tacit knowledge during a project's lifecycle. In addition, individuals desire

ease of use and accessibility, suggesting that social media (SM) should be integrated.

For this purpose, this research analyzed a solution with a technical instrument,

through a design science research approach, with the intention of answering the

research question: How well does knowledge project management work with the

integrated use of project management tools? The Social Media for Project Manage-

ment (SM4PM), a prescriptive framework for guiding the integrated use of SM in pro-

ject management (PM), was instantiated to evaluate KM in PM in a public security

organization. Data collection was done through interviews, direct observations, docu-

ment analysis, and focus group. These data were analyzed using MaxQdaPlus. After

the implementation, SM4PM was refined and redesigned. Results showed that SM

support KM in activities related to PM, giving strong evidence that SM4PM can be

generalized to solve a class of problems, such as collecting lessons learned naturally

during the project lifecycle, managing the knowledge in PM, and understanding the

relationship between processes and their integration. As a contribution, the study

empirically applied “theory to practice”by instantiating a technical instrument based

on the “theory of doing well”and applied “theory from practice”to refine this techni-

cal instrument. This applied research solves a class of problems involving KM in PM

during the whole project lifecycle with a unique artifact.

1|INTRODUCTION

As knowledge is unique, intangible, difficult to copy, and rare, it has

strategic value, becoming a vital resource and a new economic cur-

rency (Ragab & Arisha, 2015). Knowledge, like any other value, should

be held and developed in order to grow. To this end, knowledge man-

agement (KM) is necessary. KM is a multifaceted discipline (Alavi &

Leidner, 2001), and over the years, KM studies have been developed

under different lens: looking deeply at activities such as creating,

retaining, and transferring (Alavi & Leidner, 2001; Argote, McEvily, &

Reagans, 2003); exploring individual characteristics, perceptions, and

behaviors (Connelly, Ford, Turel, Gallupe, & Zweig, 2014); and consid-

ering organization (Lancini, 2015), group, and individual (Topping,

2016) as a unit of analysis.

In this multifaceted view, we first have to understand the defini-

tion of KM. In Levy's (2009) view, KM has four components: process,

technology, context, and culture. Alavi and Leidner (2001) also include

a knowledge application process, giving relevance to applying the

knowledge. Analyzing the set of ideas of the authors mentioned, they

are aligned with Wiig's (1997)KM aims definitions (p. 2): “the overall

purpose of KM is to maximize the enterprise's knowledge assets and

to renew them constantly.”In these perceptions, this study considers

the following KM definition: a management of knowledge with pro-

cess, technology, context, and culture components (Levy, 2009) with

the objective to create, store/retrieve, transfer, and apply the knowl-

edge (Alavi & Leidner, 2001) to achieve the purpose of maximizing the

enterprise's knowledge assets and of renewing them constantly

(Wiig, 1997).

Received: 9 November 2018 Accepted: 17 January 2020

DOI: 10.1002/kpm.1627

Knowl Process Manag. 2020;27:197–210. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/kpm © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 197