Tools can assist to implement a project delivery methodology. PKM provides an opportunity to bring in sensible automation of the project delivery. I believe that a tool can be created to implement PKM, customised to the environment suitable to the organisation needs. The tool may be based on project knowledge and its quality assurance. It may be enhanced by adding other standard features such as collaboration, configuration management and work flow. It may also be expanded to support the execution and management related activities. It may then be used to automate most of the project delivery.

This chapter identifies category of tools existing in the market for project delivery. It visualises how PKM can enhance existing tools. It also visualises PKM as a tool at a conceptual level.

Automation Potential in Project Delivery

Let us try to understand the automation potential of project delivery from the perspective of KDD. Project delivery consists of activities related to project knowledge and project execution, as well as management of both.

There are tools around project knowledge that are either requirement driven or test driven, but they are generally weak in solution design and application design. There are tools specialised in certain areas of solution design or application design, such as business process modelling tools.

In project execution, there are packages which have reduced the role of coding and rely more on customising the product. SAP is a representative example. In cases where there are no packages, the latest programming languages have made coding easier assisting the development team.

Automation of build (code generation) from detailed specifications is also possible.

Project management tools are also available in the market. They are used for planning, estimating and monitoring purposes, where the data from the project knowledge and execution phases is fed manually most of the time.

Considering project delivery from the knowledge perspective can bring more maturity to the automation efforts. Let us understand it in details as below.

End-to-end project delivery creates five forms of project knowledge:

Each of these forms of project knowledge is complete in itself and can be mapped to others at the lowest level. One interesting deviation is requirement.