Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to create an understanding of how professional services firms serving the construction industry manage knowledge. It takes an exploratory approach to knowledge management (KM) in quantity surveying (QS) practices in both Hong Kong and the UK to compare the similarities and differences between the two locations. The reasons for selecting QS practices as the research focus are four-fold.

First, QS firms are knowledge-intensive organizations or professional services organizations, and quantity surveyors (QSs) are knowledge workers. They possess the means of production (i.e. knowledge), and the product or service that they sell to their clients or customers is knowledge (Drucker, 1993). It is of interest to understand how knowledge is managed in this type of practice in the absence of formal KM policies. The success of this type of firm will ultimately depend on the competence of their professionals, relative to that of their counterparts in rival firms (Sveiby and Lloyd, 1987). Secondly, QS firms function in a project-based industry (Bresnen et al., 2003), where knowledge is regarded as a vital resource for delivering the clients requirements (Love et al., 2003). In addition, it creates competitive advantage for the firm (Allee, 1997). This provides an incentive to investigate how project knowledge is managed and shared across teams and across time within the company. Thirdly, QS firms are project organizations, in which everyone in the project team is dependent on the others work, both within the firm and external to the...