FROZEN STORIES - Capturing and Utilizing Frozen Stories for Teaching of Project Managers

Tanja Buttler, Stephan Lukosch, Alexander Verbraeck

2011

Abstract

Learning from projects is one of the major challenges which appears to be critical to consistent success of project-based organizations. To learn from past projects for current problem situations, knowledge and experience often has to be shared across time or space. However, while it seems to be possible to capture explicit knowledge (e.g. about products and technical problems), softer types of knowledge (i.e. knowledge about the processes that a team had deployed to achieve their goals and why these processes seemed to have worked well or badly) are more difficult to retain. By observing how knowledge people like managers or engineers communicate, we have found that they tell stories. Stories are an ancient way to communicate experiences (i.e. direct observations of or participation in events as a basis of knowledge) and are used by todays engineers to convey the challenges and solutions they encountered. Based on these grounds we propose an approach to freeze stories of project managers by capturing (and processing) their stories and thereby opening up an opportunity for sharing these stories across space and time. First trials of this approach are promising: it was easy for project managers to share experiences resulting in rich accounts. In addition, we tested the acceptance and applicability of frozen stories with apprentice project managers. We found that it reminded them of their own experiences and of stories they have heard. Furthermore, it stimulated the exchange of experiences with peers.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Buttler T., Lukosch S. and Verbraeck A. (2011). FROZEN STORIES - Capturing and Utilizing Frozen Stories for Teaching of Project Managers . In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU, ISBN 978-989-8425-49-2, pages 120-129. DOI: 10.5220/0003344701200129

in Bibtex Style

@conference{csedu11,
author={Tanja Buttler and Stephan Lukosch and Alexander Verbraeck},
title={FROZEN STORIES - Capturing and Utilizing Frozen Stories for Teaching of Project Managers},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU,},
year={2011},
pages={120-129},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0003344701200129},
isbn={978-989-8425-49-2},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU,
TI - FROZEN STORIES - Capturing and Utilizing Frozen Stories for Teaching of Project Managers
SN - 978-989-8425-49-2
AU - Buttler T.
AU - Lukosch S.
AU - Verbraeck A.
PY - 2011
SP - 120
EP - 129
DO - 10.5220/0003344701200129