Learning to learn, from past to future

As we look from the past to the future of the field of project management, one of the great challenges is the largely untapped opportunity for transforming our projects' performance. We have yet to discern how to systematically extract and disseminate management lessons as we move from project to project, and as we manage and execute portfolios of projects. As managers, executives, and researchers in project management, we have yet to learn how to learn. In this paper, the authors discuss some of the reasons behind the failure to systematically learn, and present an approach and modeling framework that facilitates cross-project learning. The approach is then illustrated with a case study of two multi-$100 million development projects.