Tacit Knowledge Integration within Traditional Procurement Project

in a construction project because it is the experience that people achieved during project implementation, which is stored in person’s brain. In other words, managing tacit knowledge means trying to get access to the stored knowledge in person’s brain.

R1: “Tacit knowledge probably is the most important because that’s the knowledge of how to do stuff; explicit knowledge is who has got the power.”

R3: “Tacit knowledge by its definition can only reside in people’s head, so managing tacit knowledge means managing people’s brain, managing people means keeping employees in the company and getting novice employees to learn from experienced employees.”

137 | P a g e

The respondent expressed that the people at manager level are more aware of the importance of knowledge, but it is not managed properly due to existing challenges in both different types of procurement and the KM system.

R2: “I think people are rational and have common sense; they are aware of the importance of managing knowledge, but the problem is that the person who has to pay the price of the extra effort needed to capture is not the same person who will benefit from it in the future”

R4: “However, the facts that make managing tacit knowledge more difficult are the poor knowledge management system that exists in construction organisation and the nature of different procurement types that exist, specifically in the traditional procurement system, due to the separation of design and construction phase.”

Despite this fact, people at both the organisational and project level are not well aware of the importance of tacit knowledge and TKI, specifically in the TPS. It has been noted that project members are encouraged to walk away at the end of project and not share their information and knowledge in the TPS (R4: the traditional procurement system by definition encourages people to walk away at the end and not to share information.)

Further probing of the respondents about the TKI within the construction project undertaken through the TPS, it was highlighted that knowledge and information does not integrate properly in the process of traditional-based construction project.

R1: “In the traditional system that information and knowledge does not flow properly in the process, because architects, engineers and contractors are incentivised to do the opposite, are incentivised to keep that knowledge because that is what they are selling in the marketplace so they don’t want to give that knowledge to somebody else who can replicate it. They want to control by themselves”

Therefore, not only are knowledge and experiences not captured and shared but also mistakes and problems are not documented and, therefore, have potential to occur in future project by designers, engineers, and contractors. Thus, these professionals cannot benefit from the learned material and experiences from the current project for use in future projects. The

138 | P a g e

respondents agreed that learning from previous projects and applying those lessons would prevent problems in current projects; the aim of TKI.

R2: “We can address this problem. We can get this forth sight by learning from previous projects, and in particular learning the tacit knowledge from previous projects, and if we learn how in previous projects certain decisions let the problems in construction phase, perhaps we can apply these lessons learnt to prevent those problems in our project, prevent those problems from occurring at the construction phase.”

This happens because the TPS itself does not make the project team to be aware of the consequences of their decisions (specifically the design decisions) and incentivises them to keep their knowledge. In other words, there are no incentives for project members to take the extra effort and participate in KM.

R4: “I think people involved in project undertaken through traditional procurement system do not have that incentive to keep what they learnt during the project.”

Furthermore, the respondents stated that tacit knowledge at the design and construction phase are different. The tacit knowledge at design phase is more problematic and harder to manage because the design phase is more complex.

R3: “I think it is particularly difficult and problematic in design phase to manage the tacit knowledge as all of the expertise and the skills in design are almost linked to tacit knowledge.”

R1: “The individual, architect or firm might make a mistake in a design and they might take it forward to any other commission that they have……I think if the designers only have experience the traditional system, the traditional system does not expose them enough to the consequences of the design decisions, so it is likely that they may repeat the same mistakes from one project to another.”

Therefore, there is a need to integrate this tacit knowledge within the process of a traditional construction project in order to minimise the potential mistakes and increase the productivity of project members in future projects. However, this integration requires a knowledge

139 | P a g e

repository which is better to be in position of the designing organisations in this type of procurement.