Introduction

This final chapter describes the experiences of a team of management scientists helping a global manufacturing company to learn from its project management experiences, mainly from project failures. The team has been involved in detailed post-mortem analysis of a range of projects as part of work preparing claims by contractors against clients over the past eleven years, particularly delay and disruption (D&D) claims. The projects have been in a range of industries, including railway rolling-stock, aerospace, civil engineering and shipbuilding, and have been situated in Europe, Canada, the UK and the USA. The total value of all the claims has been around US $1.5 billion, all of which has been met with a significant degree of success through out-of-court settlements. A significant proportion of these claims has been with one particular global manufacturing company, and both the company and the team have been concerned to ensure that organizational learning is attained from the experiences, resulting in changes in project management practice.

The chapter initially looks at why learning from complex projects is usually difficult. It is argued that it is the systemic nature of complex projects that the reasons for their behaviour are not always apparent. Analysis that appreciates the systemic consequences of disruptions is crucial to organizational learning. This type of analysis facilitates the project team to appreciate the systemicity inherent in such projects. This appreciation, though, needs to be converted in changed practice which requires an infusion into...