Collection

gives them a platform to test the new software and a first reference.

The human resource consultancy have had several issues with the customer due to their failing human resource system and needed a new solution to satisfy their customer. In addition, it being a tailored software in accordance to their needs, the solution can facilitate their work and help a more efficient working climate for the customer as well as other clients in the future.

The customer needs an HR software to facilitate some of the processes within the organization. Most of the processes were done manually by the team, such as absences, payroll or learning and development opportunities. Another issue is the need to reach a wide demographic audience, due to not all of their staff not working in house. Their aim is to have a tool which is easy to use for their employees and at the same time gives them the opportunity to enter their HR needs in one place as well as facilitating internal HR processes.

3.5 Data Collection and Analysis

3.5.1 Collection

The data collection was done over a three-month period, where weekly meetings were held for the project. Creswell (1998) states that long interviews with up to 10 people, Boyd (2001) states two to ten participants, is sufficient to explore a phenomenological study which fits with the researched group of twelve people, where five people take a key position in the project are the focus of the study. In total 34 hours of meetings were recorded which centres around the refinement of the software. The exchange of tacit and explicit, expert, knowledge during this period was elevated due to the participants aim to finalize the software for operation and trying to “get it right” under time pressure.

The project was limited to the 34 hours, since the aim of the research was to focus on the project before going ‘live’. The beginning of the project started with the weekly meetings where the participants sat together and could exchange their expert knowledge among one another. The data collection ended with the project going live. Using grounded theory,

participant observation allowed a more dynamic approach to the research. The two main sources of data were recording meetings and field notes. Once the data was evaluated it became clear that the field notes were not

revealing the participant’s tacit knowledge exchange but merely personal thoughts of the researcher towards the different actors and their role within the project. This however could also be seen through the recorded meetings. Emerging through the richness of the recorded meetings, the evaluation of knowledge being passed on from one participant to the other and their oral response became the focus of the research.

The participants of the study were predetermined by the project leaders. Kruger (1988) states participants need to have had experiences relating to the phenomenon to be researched. The different expertise offered by the participants in the project are prerequisite to their involvement in the project. The different fields of work involved in the project, require expertise from the human resources, software engineering, consultancy and finance. The participants are discussed the section companies and people involved.

The data collection ended at the launch of the project, after the training sessions were held, due to the project officially being over and the weekly meetings finishing as well. After this period, the focus lies constant optimization of the software, which is operational and not part of the

development project. Therefore, follow up – recall – interviews were not held since the aim of the research was to capture tacit knowledge at its creation and augmentation during the development phase, not revisiting the project.

The unstructured interviews come in form of meetings, where the natural flow of conversation between project members permits tacit

knowledge to unfold and allows its transformation to explicit knowledge. As previously stated, the form participant observation – fieldwork – is the

recording of a prolonged activity or ceremony. Throughout the meetings, the goal is to resolve issues and to fill participants’ gaps of knowledge in order to achieve a well-functioning, complete software. In the following section,

methods to analyse text in a narrative form are discussed as well as specific models used to answer research questions 2 and 3.

3.5.2 Analysis

34 hours of meetings were recorded over the three-month period. The meetings were each set out to last three hours twice a week, with a

conference call between a human resource consultancy organization, a software development organization as well as a customer in need of a new human resource software, once a week. However, due to holidays and several hours of data input into the system some of the sessions were not taken into account. The group agreed on the research and recording of the meetings during the first meeting. At this point the role as a researcher in the project was established. The meetings could run short as well as over time and some included data entry into the software, which is a purely tacit action and therefore does not have an audio trail. At the very end of the project, training modules were held on-site at the customer’s headquarters, which were also recorded. These different meeting approaches needed to be considered during the analysis. This subsection will discuss the analysis procedure as well as methods used to analyse the data.

The meetings consisted of three stakeholders, the software

development organization, the customer and a human resource consultancy firm. Within each organization different roles can be found which contribute knowledge to the project. The software development organization has

software developers or engineers, who work mainly in the back office, who at times communicated with the human resource organization or the customer when necessary. Their knowledge was software specific and needed input from the software development executives or managers, who advised them on the customer’s needs. These managers are crucial for the interaction of