Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-1-2015
Abstract
Project post-mortems have been identified as a key strategy for organizations to learn from their past failures and improve system development project performance. Although several guidelines for conducting post-mortems have been proposed those conducted result often in little novel insight and understanding. This study seeks to understand how the information captured and used as part of project post-mortems is or is not leveraged to facilitate organizational learning and what factors thwart such efforts. Twenty-five project and program managers are interviewed for how they collect, interpret, and use project data to learn and build local theories of project performance. Our findings suggest that post-mortem practices can facilitate organizational learning, however, we found the lack of incentives to use the data, opportunities and weak mechanisms for sharing post-mortem knowledge are key barriers for using generated project information for improved learning during post mortems.
Keywords
organizational learning, knowledge management, Weatherhead School of Management, project post-mortems, organizational learning, knowledge transfer, knowledge retention, knowledge creation
Rights
© The Author(s). This is an open access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Department/Center
Design & Innovation
Recommended Citation
Pettiway, Tarina, "How Do Project Post-Mortems Contribute to Organizational Learning?" (2015). Student Scholarship. 236.
https://commons.case.edu/studentworks/236