Lessons learned practices in the engineering, procurement and construction sector

Abstract

Citation: CARRILLO ABSTRACT The exploitation of lessons learned to improve performance on future projects is highly desirable for many construction organisations. The vision of an organisation that can readily recall what went well on a project and attempt to recreate those successes as well as avoiding the repetition of past mistakes offers commercial sense. This paper adopts a case study methodology to investigate how Canadian Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) companies address lessons learned on their construction projects. The paper concludes with a number of recommendations for UK companies regarding how the process may be improved in terms of encouraging lessons learned to occur, the timing of lessons learned sessions, identifying participants, the format for documenting lessons learned and how these should be disseminated. Prokesch,1997). The construction industry has also recognised that although each project is unique there are some processes that are repeatable and thus there is scope to transfer learning from previous projects. This is the realm of lessons learned. Lessons learned aim to capture the positive and negative aspects of projects in order to learn from the experience thereby avoiding the repetition of mistakes which can be costly and damaging to the company's reputation. This paper therefore investigates the lessons learned practices of construction companies in Canada with the aim of identifying how lessons learned can be improved and exploited in the UK construction sector. The paper adopts a case study methodology to investigate a number of aspects of lessons learned including how it is done, who participates, the type of documentation required and how best lessons may be disseminated. Keywords: lessons learned, construction, knowledge management, Alberta INTRODUCTION "Most activities or tasks are not one-time events. .. Our philosophy is fairly simple: Every time we do something again, we should do it better then the last time" (BP's Group Chief Executive John Brown in

The needs and benefits of Text Mining applications on Post-Project Reviews

“…In his assessment of PPRs, Busby [3] highlighted that "PPRs were important learning mechanisms and their value seems to be underestimated by individuals who do not appreciate the need to disseminate insights throughout the organization". PPRs are often conducted as a part of companies' quality systems, however a major problem lies in the fact that companies have insufficient resource to act on the outcome of PPRs [4]. Companies often have individuals with responsibility for creating PPRs, but they do not have individuals or teams responsible for subsequently analyzing the PPRs collectively to identify the good or bad practice and areas requiring improvements across a range of projects.…”

“…Benefits gained by organisations from conducting PPRs have been highlighted in Tan et al [9] and Carrillo [4] and include:…”

“…Very few research projects have studied PPRs in construction or manufacturing organisations, but the limited published literature that does exist in construction includes Kamara et al [6], Sowards [10], Carrillo [4] and in manufacturing includes Motteram, and Sizer, [11]; Koners and Keith [12]. The importance of PPR is emphasised by its frequent mention in different knowledge management literature including business, information technology, space project management and aerospace[pmc1] [9], construction [4], manufacturing [12], information technology [2,33], space project management [14], R & D [15], software development [16], environmental studies [17], finance [18] and operations research [19].…”

Towards a framework for Knowledge Management in Project Management

“…These documentation attempt to capture the knowledge of staff who worked on these projects. Post project reviews (PPR) have been recognised as strategies for capturing and codifying project knowledge (Carrillo, 2005). Although documentation may contain project knowledge, they are often not in readily usable format to enable decision making.…”

“…Although documentation may contain project knowledge, they are often not in readily usable format to enable decision making. Research has been carried out in the area of learning from post project reviews (Terry, 2004;Carrillo, 2005). Post project review meetings, evaluation reports, and lessons learned databases offer a rich source of knowledge for projects if they have the time to analyse them.…”