Experience Management within Project Management Processes

The business process revolution has had two impacts on project management: the recognition of a process perspective (such as the 39 appearing in the PMBOK), and the acknowledgement that these processes reflect project management knowledge (such as the nine knowledge areas in the same publication). These two levels have been extended, through an architecture (HCRN – hierarchical case retrieval network), to include and interlink decisionmaking tasks encountered by project managers. Experiments indicate an adequate degree of success in being able to transform a decision situation into a knowledge focus comprising relevant cases from different case bases, and the interactions between them. The knowledge focus provides a basis for experience management of decisionmaking within project management processes. 1 Project management and business processes The “business process revolution” has introduced a paradigm shift in management – the process view of the firm – which has swept through the corporate landscape [HS99]. This perspective has been adopted in project management [Pm00] as emphasized by Brandt and Nick [BN01]: “There is general agreement today that increasing individualization of business performance and business processes is the reason for the assimilation of routine-oriented business processes to the classic project model”. The business process concept separates enterprise (or organizational) processes into two categories: technological processes concerned with specifying and creating the enterprise product or service; and business processes concerned with administering, directing and managing other enterprise activities. “When a number of tasks accumulate to constitute the execution of some substantial organizational (or business) requirement, they are commonly referred to as business processes” [Fa01]. In project management this concept is reflected in the 39 “business” processes incorporated into the Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) [Pm00], also accepted as an IEEE Standard 1490-1998. The Guide also reflects a further management paradigm – knowledge management – as reflected in the classification of the 39 processes into nine knowledge areas [Pm00]. However, these knowledge areas and project management processes for organizing a project only provide a generic framework for knowledge capture and reuse, but do not detail the intraand inter-process decisionmaking knowledge that would actually be