Knowledge Sharing Pattern Language

Problem	A project team is missing certain competence areas that are required in a project.
Initial Context	Missing competence areas have been identified (e.g. Improved Competences, KSP18).
Roles	An organization represented by e.g. Director of Projects (head of the project office) together with the Project Manger.
Forces	Good project managers are very valuable resources. The ones already having that status must be supported to avoid burn-out and the others must be trained to be good project managers. Pressures for the project managers are quite high in many projects. Project managers have much power and need to make difficult decisions with limited amounts of knowledge. To have satisfied project managers with growing skills of software development projects, some kind of knowledge support must be arranged. This is also a good way of supporting project managers’ learning-by-doing.
Solution	Initiate steering group. Define and assign a steering group for the project including persons having adequate authority and knowledge to support the project manager. Check Competence Gaps. Look through the earlier identified competence gaps (e.g. Improved Competences, KSP18). Check also that the following perspectives have been covered: Technology knowledge support Process knowledge support, also quality assurance roles. Project management knowledge support Plan How to Solve. Decide, how the gaps and missing experts are to be found (in-house, external etc.). Utilize also the Named Experts (KSP02) when reasonable. Check availability of required persons. Assign Experts. Name the experts for the project or give permission to utilize external experts. The assignment can be part time or full time. Communicate the assignments so that the selected experts and the project team knows about those. Note, that permission to purchase external expertise could have been taken also earlier e.g. for subcontracting. Each project team member also has an unofficial, private contact network. That network is encouraged to be used noticing the information security etc. limitations (See My Network, KSP21).
Resulting Context	Project teams and especially Project Managers in the organization have the feeling that a support network exists which can help.
Instances	This pattern is utilized once to arrange this support for a new project and after that always when it needs to be redefined. One potential pitfall is that experts are named but they do not have any time to act in this role while being 100 % assigned to other projects.
Process Connection	Project management process