Project Management has become very important over the years. Organisational hierarchies are becoming more and more flatter. Structures are changing from the typical hierarchical orientated company to flat, two or three level hierarchies and even less. The structural organigram vanishes from a typical functional organization to a matrix or project orientated organization. This allows a significant shortening of information paths and decision flows. "Management by projects" may become the corporate’s culture of such project-driven companies [Gareis 1992; Saynisch 1990]. This lead me to the point to realise, that it is absolutely necessary to integrate knowledge management into the field of project management. To achieve this goal, possible ways to implement "knowledge" as the number one business resource into the project landscapes of the companies in the late 90s of the current millennium have to be investigated.

In order to make this research field more tangible, I tried to cluster the distributed project work ("verteilte Projektabwicklung" in German) into three areas. The areas (views) are described in the following paragraphs:

• Knowledge from a Project Management perspective
  • This concerns general management aspects like Skill Management (How to staff projects with the right people with the right know-how, available with the desired amount of time), Knowledge about the organizational structures, Knowledge about how to procede with exceptions / deviations that may occur - short: things project managers or steering committees need to know.
• "Operative" Project Knowledge
  • Meaning the knowledge concerning the daily project work of the project teams. Knowledge about where to find the needed information, support of daily project tasks ("Where is the construction diagram for subphase x?", "Which team member was responsible for that thing?").
• Ex-Post View
  • By regarding this aspect, a horizontal, chronological view is added. An ex-post analysis of experiences from completed projects takes place and is used in succeeding projects. In this respect, project know-how is recycled while at the same time company knowledge is successively enriched. Besides this, mechanisms for the general exchange of knowledge within a common project in a distributed environment will be addressed.