The role of PMO in establishing knowledge management networks

Khalilzadeh, Mohammad; Kianfar, Farhad

The importance of knowledge networks for knowledge creation, acquirement, retention, transfer and dissemination where activities are project-based has been highlighted in the relative literature. Increasingly, project management office (PMO) has been received extensive attention in recent years. Despite that, a review of the literature does not provide a clear function of project management office in establishing knowledge networks in organizations. The role of PMO in standardization of learning practices for the knowledge management has been neglected. What is required is a means of encapsulating this project-based knowledge management and learning in an oriented way that can be standardized and formalized by PMO and used by project managers to enhance the overall project performance. This paper presents an empirical contribution to the study of the project management office (PMO) and its effective role in implementation of standardized patterns for managing knowledge in project-oriented organizations. The aim is also to relate the conceptualization of project knowledge management to project management office. We present a framework together with a twostep approach conducted though several discussions and semi-structured interviews with the senior managers as well as the project team members for project practitioners to clearly demonstrate how the project executing companies can establish effective project knowledge management networks through PMO. The results show that this two-step approach together with the framework is simple and easy to be used for project-oriented companies in different industries.