Sharing knowledge across projects: Limits to ICT-led project review practices

Abstract

A common strategy to transfer knowledge from projects is for project teams to capture 'lessons learned' and store these on a database for others to access. This strategy is widely adopted but such databases are not widely used. This article explores why cross-project knowledge transfer fails, using data from 13 projects in six organizations. Following Cook and Brown, the analysis focuses on why knowledge captured from one project is typically not used as a 'tool of knowing' by others. The results suggest that the knowledge captured is not deemed useful and/or project teams lack awareness that there is knowledge that could be useful to help them improve their processes. Copyright © 2006 Sage Publications.