"If only we could do that again"
Project Practice Grounds Improving Project Performance in the 21st Century

Pilots, surgeons, soldiers, stage actors and cricketers have all long understood the importance of practising their activities in order to improve their performance and reduce the risk of failure in the real world. Flight simulators, cadavers, wargames, empty theatres and batting nets are all essential tools for applying the most basic principle of performance improvement: the need to test, practise, and perform ‘dry-runs’. In contrast, project managers have to use their real projects, real organisations and real customers as their main practice grounds. Accordingly, the learning process, especially during complex and uncertain projects, can be very expensive and a common sentiment amongst project managers is: “if only we could do that again…”

With the success of organisations being ever more closely linked to their project management capability, there is now an abundance of project management literature and training courses on the topic. Many of the courses conclude with multiple-choice knowledge tests, leading to a “qualification”. Project management, however,
is a highly practical discipline; it is what project managers do, as opposed to what they know, that counts. This is illustrated by the fact that project learning reviews consistently produce the same list of reasons for problems and failure: unclear objectives, poor communication, head-in-the-sand risk management, etc. We know that we need to engage stakeholders effectively; the challenge lies in actually doing it!

This phenomenon has been dubbed the “Knowing-Doing Gap¹”:
in the world of business research and academia there is too much emphasis on gathering the wisdom, and not enough emphasis on how to transfer expertise and ensure that practitioners actually apply the knowledge: i.e. change behaviour.

 “The only source of knowledge is experience”  Albert Einstein.

Read Complete Viewpoints Paper >>