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
Recommended Citation
Pettiway, Tarina and Lyytinen, Kalle, "How do Post Mortems Contribute to Organizational Learning?" (2017). AMCIS 2017 Proceedings. 11.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2017/ITProjMgmt/Presentations/11
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