Post-Project Reviews to Gain Effective Lessons Learned

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INTRODUCTION

1.1 Introduction

The need to manage projects well, and to learn from one project to the next, is of vital importance as our world becomes more and more project-based. Our management of complex projects is often seen as less effective than it might be, and consequently, we do need to learn from one project to the next. This is a well-known theory (Collison and Parcell 2001; Kerzner 2000)—but in practice, projects are often not reviewed at all for various reasons (Williams et al. 2001) If they are reviewed, the methods don’t account for the complexity or try to explain causality, so there is no understanding about what went wrong (or right) and why (MacMaster 2000). So with a few exceptions, it appears that project reviews are ...