Strategic Approach to Lessons Learned in Iranian Construction Projects

Nowadays, in the age of information, using knowledge effectively has a great impression on business success. Therefore managing employees knowledge needs significant attention in strategic level. Some of this knowledge comes from practice and needs to be gathered, stored and managed to transfer to next projects. It is not reasonable approach to leave these worthy treasures to gathered and used by chance. This is applicable to project-based business which success is depended on the knowledge and skills of involved people. In every project problems arise, we find alternate solutions to choose, but it takes time and cost to analyze situation. We simply can adopt past experiment without much effort. Actually, these valuable experiences are hiding among plenty of report, change orders, checklists, official and unofficial correspondences and any other documents that generated during project life time. These empirical data must be processed and changed to profitable form of information and knowledge. Resulted information can be used in planning phase to optimize schedule and budget and to develop risk mitigation plan. Also it can be taken in account for managing risks when they occurred or preventing a hazardous situation during project time The positive side is that sometimes these experiences bring new opportunity to organization to increase its benefit of project by adopting innovative ideas have been inspired from past experiments. So the goal of lessons learned is to establish a process for enabling, supporting and transferring knowledge across projects. The mentioned objectives could be achieved by developing systematic lessoned learned approach in strategic level.

Keywords:

Lessons Learned , Knowledge management , Continuous improvement , best practices