Project knowledge management webinar

Does learning transfer from one project to another? If so, how? Projects are temporary organisations. Evidence suggests that as projects transition from planning and building, to their running phases, a lot of explicit and implicit knowledge is lost. The result is institutional amnesia.

James G. March, the admired Stanford Professor of organisational behaviour, advanced the idea of “myopia of learning” in companies. March found that organisations have a tendency to be short-sighted in learning across the three dimensions of space, time, and failure. Project organisations tend not to learn easily, and when they do, they overweight learnings from nearby (vs far-away) places; recent (vs historical) examples; and success (vs failure) stories.

This webinar discussed the challenges of learning across projects; the underlying root causes of poor knowledge flows; and presented a potential technological cure to help institutionalise knowledge in projects.    

Dr Atif Ansar, Founding Director, Oxford’s Programme on Sustainable Capital-Intensive Industries

Atif's expertise is on the confluence of large physical assets and technology. In particular, he is interested in how big capital projects have the potential to improve their performance and productivity, across their whole life-cycle, with the use of technologies such as big data, shared platforms, automation, and Artificial Intelligence.

Atif’s research is widely cited and features regularly in the media including outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, the New Yorker, the Financial Times, among others. 

He is the Chairman and co-founder of a big data and advanced analytics firm called Foresight Works, which works with Fortune 500 companies in capital-intensive industries such as power utilities, oil and gas or mining firms, and construction and engineering firms.

Atif is a Fellow of Keble College, University of Oxford and Founding Director of Oxford’s Programme on Sustainable Capital-Intensive Industries, and Senior Fellow of the MSc in Major Programme Management at Oxford Saïd Business School. Dr Ansar is a Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University (China’s top-ranked university) and a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University. Atif completed his DPhil (PhD) in 2010. Studying at Brasenose College, Oxford University, he received the prestigious Clarendon Award from the Oxford University Press for his doctorate.

Atif has very kindly allowed his presented material to be made available for viewing. The webinar recording is on YouTube and now available in our APM resources area and also embedded below for reference.

Previous presentations and webinars can be viewed on the APM Slideshare and YouTube channels. Follow @APMEvents for upcoming event information.

This event is suitable for professionals with a beginners' level of experience.

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