Sharing Learning across Projects: Limits to Current ‘best Practice’ Initiatives

Many companies attempt to encourage cross-project knowledge transfer so that lessons learnt on one project are reused by other projects. The most common strategy for encouraging this cross-project knowledge transfer is to require project teams to capture what has happened on a project and to write down lessons learned, which are then stored on a database and so available through the intranet for others to learn from. Unfortunately, while this ICT-based strategy is widely adopted research has tended to find that such databases are not widely used. In this paper we draw upon data from 13 projects in 6 different organizations to consider why this stored knowledge is not deemed to be helpful in encouraging cross-project learning. In analyzing the cases, we explore the suggestion made by Cook and Brown (1999) that ‘knowledge is a tool of knowing’. More specifically, in analyzing the case data we consider why knowledge captured from one project is typically not used as a ‘tool of knowing’ by other projects. The results suggest that this is because the knowledge that is captured is often not the useful knowledge and because project teams are often unaware that there is knowledge that could be a useful tool to help them improve their processes.