Project team members are different specialists brought together to form the project team . Each specialist has his or her own professional training and knowledge formed from experiences in previous project teams. More often than not, the project team is an interorganizational team consisting of multiple individuals and multiple organizations with different professional cultures. This situation creates more barriers to transmission of knowledge throughout the team, as each participating project organization seeks to protect its own interests. The core project team is likely to be dispersed at, or more likely before, the end of the project. Little time or resources are generally devoted to capturing what people know . Effort is often focused on immediate deliverables (e.g. drawings, reports, calculations, the building or facility itself), with no emphasis on what is being done now to help future projects. Project knowledge resides within the project team and the project itself does not have any organizational memory (Fiol and Lyles, 1985). Compared with non-project organizations that are supported both by the organizational structure and knowledge-absorbing routines, where knowledge becomes routinized and socialized into the organization, project-based organizations generally do not have support mechanisms that enable knowledge transfer to occur.

Project organizations typically involve people with different knowledge, experience and skills who come together to solve a common task; projects can thus be seen as arenas for knowledge creation, integration and sharing, where new and proven ideas and thoughts are combined. A serious drawback in the project-based organization is that...