Knowledge workers

... but that's never stopped me from answering. ^_^ The first bastion of knowledge workers was civil service, as the earliest empires began to grow and require larger governments. The key difference between knowledge workers and physical laborers was noticed early on: knowledge-oriented tasks do not respond well to overwork. President Martin Van Buren shortened the work week of federal employees from 72 hours to 60 in 1840. The Industrial Era brought knowledge work into the private sector. Henry Ford recognized the importance of alertness and coordination on the assembly line, and established the 40 hour week in 1926. It became standard after WWII. If there is one thing that IT managers can do to match project management practices to the attributes of knowledge workers, it is to face the facts that their predecessors already discovered and stop working their staff to death. The average work week in the U.S. is now 49 hours, virtually the same as at the turn of the last Century. IT, which promised to make our lives easier, is ironically one of the worst offenders. Programmers with placards exhorting them to "Work Smarter, Not Harder" can be found in their cubicles at 10PM and on weekends, working for nothing more than free pizza. Overwork is the single greatest cause of software defects. Haven't we all learned that in just three hours of overtime we can make enough errors to set a project back by a whole day? Companies in other high-tech knowledge-intensive industries like petrochemicals have discovered that by SHORTENING their work weeks, they reduced their internal rework and product return rates so sharply that productivity actually increased. America needs to adopt rigorous timekeeping and to index the Fair Labor Standards Act for inflation, so that IT managers cannot legally force their employees to work overtime, much less unpaid overtime. Everyone will come out ahead.

The answer depends on how you view knowledge workers. There are two schools of thought here.

First, there are those that have amassed such a body of what is often perceived as an 'empire' of information that they are considered unique and irreplaceable. Thus, they are carefully handled to prevent even the possibility of their leaving for other pursuits. This type is generally a 'loner' or close to it and may be difficult to manage since they perceive every request as a means to 'steal' their knowledge.

The second type is the person who has a particular intuitive ability to klnow where information can be found to enhance an ongoing effort, or has built a strong informal network for information and assistance outside the normal working chain.

This second type is a vaued addition to most workgroups and will do well, as long as the group understands that the KW network may be larger than the current group. With this type, though, explaining the sensitivity of a project may be all that is needed, and the KW will discreetly search out info and assitance without compromise to the project.

The first type, though, is harder to manage. This type thinks they already know all that is necessary, and they are often left out of ad-hoc or development groups because they are so difficult to work with. However, they are good sources as 'subject-matter' experts where their ego can be boosted by being the 'expert'. use these types sparingly, and only for the amount of time that is necessary to get through a particular phase or step, and be careful how you approach requests for information.