Transferring project management knowledge: Lessons learned in open standards projects

Synopsis: Significant Project Management knowledge is generated by practitioners, usually presented as ‘practitioner lessons learned’. However, the role of the academic as only project management sense-maker, excluding practitioner knowledge-creator, is questioned. An alternative view is that some academics are also important members of the project management community of practitioners because their project management skills are necessary to do collaborative industry research. Research design: Participant observation as a team member of an ICT project for development of open standards for construction. Relevance for practice / education: This dual role of academics informs reporting the outcomes of ICT projects developing open standards for construction management systems. Main findings: The ‘practitioner lessons learned’, success or failure, stories of three USA National Institute of Building Sciences ICT development projects are interpreted through academic sense-making. In addition, identification of the importance of transferring this knowledge within the academic project management community of practice is reported. Research implications: These lessons should be incorporated into the design of new open standards projects to gain construction industry acceptance, implementation and adoption. In this case, an academic project, CONie (Construction to Operations for Network information exchange) is proposed as an open standard for Road Network Asset Management in Australia and New Zealand.