This year's prize of the advisory board of the Master's programme International Project Management was awarded to Eduarda Bastos for her outstanding thesis during the 49th advisory board meeting.
Operating in a competitive environment, organisations face the need to improve the quality of their products and services. The key to this is knowledge transfer. Although in project-based organisations, organisational knowledge and know-how are mainly generated in projects, they in fact seem to learn little from projects, rarely examine the reasons for success or failure, and rarely adjust management behaviour considering the knowledge generated.
When managed effectively, knowledge could be used to improve quality and minimise 'reinventing the wheel'. Hence, learning how to learn from past performance enables organisations to improve project management systematically and continuously: Lessons Learned.
The Master´s Thesis “Lessons Learned: The Way for Continuous Improvement – Learning how to learn in the context of a project management consulting company in the construction industry” critically investigates lessons learned practices in a consulting project management organisation in the construction industry to guide it towards becoming a learning organisation.
The essential findings of the research are: (1) Lessons learned are not data collection. (2) Knowledge management goes hand in hand with project management. (3) Project Reviews are an important vehicle for Project Management Maturity. (4) High Managers: learning requires time. (5) Let’s share rather than withhold. (6) Do not forget that there is tacit and explicit knowledge. (7) Learning depends on both sides: the organisation and the people.
After all, “[t]hose who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it” (Winston Churchill, 1948) since “[w]e do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience” (John Dewey, 1993).
The Advisory Board Award was funded by TÜV SÜD AG.
