How knowledge management impacts performance in projects: An empirical study Blaize Horner Reich a , ⁎ , Andrew Gemino a , Chris Sauer b a Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada b Oxford University, Oxford, UK Received 8 May 2013; received in revised form 7 September 2013; accepted 12 September 2013 Available online 16 October 2013 Abstract This paper develops theory and tests the relationships between knowledge management and various aspects of performance in IT-enabled business projects. The proposed theory posits that knowledge management is instrumental to Project Performance when mediated by a new concept, Knowledge Alignment. The research model is tested on survey data from 212 IT-enabled business projects. Findings show that project managers who achieve Knowledge Alignment among the people and the artefacts from three parts of the project – the IT team, the business change team, and the governance team – can have a significant positive impact on the achievement of business value from the project. Achieving higher levels of Knowledge Alignment is shown to have no significant negative impact on attainment of schedule and budget targets. This is the first statistical study to demonstrate the effect of knowledge management and Knowledge Alignment on the attainment of project management targets and of business value in IT-enabled projects. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. APM and IPMA. All rights reserved. Keywords: Knowledge management; IT-enabled business projects; Project Performance; Project Management Performance; Business value 1. Introduction Projects can be important vehicles for organizational change and many change projects have an underlying dependence on information technology (IT) (Markus, 2004; Markus and Benjamin, 1996; Peppard et al., 2007). Although performance relating to these IT-enabled change projects has traditionally been defined by the achievement of scope, budget and schedule targets (Johnson, 1995; McManus and Wood-Harper, 2007), practitioners and researchers have suggested widening this definition to also include the realization of business value (Baratta, 2009; Kohli and Grover, 2008; Melville et al., 2004; Sauer and Reich, 2009). In this research, we begin the process of understanding what actions can be taken within a project to positively impact Project Performance. We take a knowledge perspective to answer the question “Does knowledge manage- ment contribute to the attainment of iron triangle and business value targets in IT-enabled business projects?” In this paper, we show that realizing business value can be positively impacted through active management of knowledge within a project. By active management, we mean the stakeholders participating in practices that help to align team members' knowledge. By knowledge, we mean the shared understanding in three core domains associated with IT-enabled change projects: 1) Knowledge of the Technical Solution, 2) Knowledge of the Organizational Solution and 3) Knowledge of the Expected Business Value. This paper suggests that the value-enabling portion of a project manager's role requires aligning knowledge across these three key domains. We propose theoretically, and demonstrate empirically, that business value is better achieved in IT-enabled change projects when knowledge is aligned across these three domains through active knowledge management. Previous research (Reich et al., 2012) has used empirical data to establish support for a three-dimensional model of ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: Blaize_Reich@sfu.ca (B.H. Reich). www.elsevier.com/locate/ijproman 0263-7863/$36.00 © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. APM and IPMA. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2013.09.004 Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect International Journal of Project Management 32 (2014) 590 – 602