Description

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

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Aug 10th, 12:00 AM

How do Post Mortems Contribute to Organizational Learning?

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