Learning Curves in Project Management: The Case of a “Troubled” Implementation

In order to survive in a rapidly evolving business environment, organizations are forced to organize more work in “projects” (Meredith and Mantel 2003). In contrast to industrial projects of the past, which usually were repeated many times, projects nowadays are complex ventures that can be signi¥cantly affected by learning. Learning causes increased productivity during the course of each activity (Ash and Smith-Daniels 1999), in’uences the effectiveness of teams, and increases ef¥ciency when performing future activities (Cohen and Levinthal 1990; Edmondson 1999). It has a much stronger impact on performance than even team size or diversity (Sarin and McDermott 2003).