Introduction

This chapter offers insights into the nature of knowledge and learning in project environments as experienced by practitioners. Drawing on a large-scale study reported in Cicmil (2003), it aspires to make a contribution towards developing a framework within which these experiences could be contained and which could guide the process of creation and evaluation of knowledge relevant to a successful accomplishment of project objectives and realization of expected benefits. The chapter does not specifically address knowledge management (KM) principles and practices, as these have been addressed earlier in this book. Moreover, the enquiry, argument and discussion presented in this chapter do not provide closure on unsolved issues in the field, nor do they aspire to suggest better prescriptions on how to manage knowledge for successful project performance. Rather, the intention is to understand and make sense of how project practitioners view the issues of knowledge and learning in project work, and what type of knowledge, according to their experience, is considered useful and relevant to successful accomplishment of the goals of a project. Through the practical considerations of the concepts of holistic, unbounded systems thinking, a multiple perspective-based participative enquiry and public reflection, the chapter offers an alternative way of thinking about the processes in which project practitioners create and share useful knowledge.

The chapter unfolds in the following way. First, the assumptions about the nature of knowledge that are of interest to projects are outlined within the field of project management. Based on an overview of...