Merit of Adaptable Pairing as an Agile Systems Engineering Knowledge Management Practice

Driven by customer demands and global competition, systems engineers often experience dramatic project shifts and rapid technological advances that can place great strains on an engineering organization. In addition, project teams also deal with changing personnel, mistakes or rework, and slow engineering response times to unplanned needs. These external and internal factors can lead to reduced quality, increased costs, and slipped schedules. An effective knowledge management architecture is a necessity in today's engineering environment, and should be treated as an important project activity. Due to constantly evolving projects and project teams, knowledge management must be able to adapt based on current needs and resources. The purpose of this paper is to present knowledge management issues that must be addressed during an engineering project, and to propose a useful operational architecture for knowledge management. This architecture will provide an image of how agile knowledge management can be used by systems engineers to counter the turbulence in today's technical work forces, and how it can be integrated into existing organizational structures. The proposed architecture is best described as adaptable pairing , where two or more individuals engage in knowledge sharing and assignment swapping to complete a specific project task. The pairing architecture will address three common knowledge management problems that may negatively impact project quality, cost, and schedule – uninformed decision making, lengthy response delays, and rework. Intents and traits of adaptable pairing may be appropriate for any industry, however, evidence will focus primarily on technology industries engaged in contract projects. Historical evidence of successful pairing in the world of software engineering is presented at the end of the paper.