The Details

I am undertaking a Doctorate in Project Management at the RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. We are under the very expert and efficient guidance of Professor Derek H.T. Walker PhD MSc Grad Dip (Mgt.Sys).

It is an interesting and challenging program done via the web and the numerous papers that Derek gets you to do forces you to think!

Some of these papers you see on this site and at HolisTech's® site are directly from the DPM.

My Thesis

What is my thesis about? Well at this stage I am keen on pursuing a theme around using what I call the Knowledge Level of Maturity (KLOM) as it relates to project management.

With the KLOM and more specifically, what I call the Project Knowledge Model (PKM), I am starting to feel that there seems to be a reasonable correlation between a poor project knowledge asset and poor performance.

This also seems to take into account the other factors affecting project success such as leadership, good management, and so on because good leaders and managers always want to know what is going on so that they can be a step ahead, hence their project knowledge asset needs to be good to do that, and so they maintain it. Conversely, poor leaders and managers don't seem to have the same approach and their knowledge asset suffers accordingly.

If this is indeed the case, then being able to measure a project's knowledge asset should provide an indicator to its future and more importantly should provide indicators for where and why the project might fail. This is where the link with risk occurs. If a project has a poor knowledge asset, the risk factors for failure would seem to increase commensurately. Accordingly, the less project knowledge the more risk.
I'll be exploring some of these concepts in my blog and on these pages and in time, my papers.