Creating Knowledge Management System for project-based organizations

The current study is driven by the growing importance of learning capabilities within organizations. Nowadays an ability to constantly develop and improve based on mistakes and broadly apply successful experience is becoming a strategic competitive advantage in highly competitive business environment. This is even more relevant for project-based organizations, where natural specifics of project activities impose higher requirements in regards to their ability to learn quickly. At the same time, despite the existing number of recommendations there are only rare cases of successful systemic application of knowledge management activities in projectbased organizations. Thus, additional exploration of the topic is required through identification of critical factors that influence implementation process. From this standpoint an exploratory research has been conducted, including an exhaustive literature review and a qualitative case study in a single company, complemented with additional interviews in ten other organizations. The combination of scrupulously summarized theoretical insights from the existing extensive range of academic research and the data obtained empirically resulted in a comprehensive theoretical framework. This framework depicts all the recommended elements that need to be incorporated into a project-based knowledge management system, as well as a list of critical factors, which should be considered while rolling out a system in practice. The current study revealed some new factors, which critically influence the success of project-based knowledge management systems implementation. These new findings are also included into the final framework and supposed to help to eliminate the existing confusion regarding the topic. Therefore, the produced comprehensive framework is highly recommended for practitioners as a starting point for planning their knowledge management system implementations projects. It also suggests further exploratory opportunities