ABSTRACT
Projects are very familiar in some organizations. For example, there are organizations that are predominantly project based. They might be operating in the field of management consultancy or in the creative and media sectors, for instance. They may well have organization-wide matrix structures in place of, or overlaid on, the traditional pyramidal hierarchy and by this means operate extensively with multi-disciplinary project teams in providing services for clients, or for business or product development purposes. Projects and project groups have also come to the fore in many more traditional kinds of organizations over recent years, where they have been associated with organizational change initiatives in, say, business process re-engineering, quality management or culture change. While learning is at the heart of our approach to projects, none of the above examples will necessarily have individual or team learning as their primary or explicit focus. Interestingly, as far as those organizations that are engaged in fashionable organizational change initiatives are concerned, the poor track record of some of these initiatives may well bear witness to this very fact.
