Storytelling as Method for Sharing Knowledge across IT Projects

This paper develops a novel perspective on and a method for capturing and sharing knowledge across IT projects. The existing literature seems to contain two perspectives on how to achieve and share experiences between projects; a reflective perspective that focuses on individual project involvement and a formal perspective that prescribes written project documentation. However these perspectives only provide limited support for the development of a shared understanding and learning from other peoples’ experiences. Based on theory and supported by experiences and analysis of a workshop with practitioners the authors propose a third perspective - the narrative. The narrative perspective serves as a foundation for the development of a method that emphasizes collective sharing of knowledge through storytelling techniques. The suggested method lets the participants both reflect on their own practice through comparison with others’ and creates a process through which they can learn from other partakers’ experiences.