KDD can drive the digitisation of project knowledge that may lead to standardising the processes of the project delivery. This may take the IT industry away from being knowledge-based and nearer to being a process-based industry. The factory model is suited to process-based industries and we can now say that KDD may enable IT industry to follow the factory model. However, changing from the current knowledge-based approach to factory approach is not simple. It needs greater appreciation of the digitisation of the project knowledge and a change in mindset to inspire the project team to work in the factory model. This chapter discusses these two topics in detail: enablement of the factory model for IT industry and the cultural change required to make it happen.

Bringing IT Project Delivery Closer to Process-Based Industry

Traditional project knowledge is contained in the following set of project documents:

KDD has digitised the project knowledge from these four documents to 189 data points. These data points are integrated with each other and provide a framework to manage the project knowledge via PKM. This will revolutionise the treatment of project knowledge and, in fact, commoditise it. This has brought software development closer to being a process-based industry from being a knowledge-based industry.

Let us understand the document production regime of project knowledge by an example. As a business analyst, I have to produce the BRS document. When I start the day in office, I will have limited idea on how long it will take; I only have an indicative estimate to refer to. With my skills, experience and networking with my colleagues I will try to complete the BRS within the given time. If I am highly skilled and experienced, I can complete the work in half the time allocated and if I am a novice business analyst, it might even take more than twice the effort and the quality of work may not be fit-for-purpose. This is a typical situation while working in a knowledge-based industry.

Let us now understand what typically happens in a factory. At the start of the day, the worker in the factory will get a target of specific output for the day.