Learning From Experience: A Natural Partner for Innovation
It’s widely accepted that infrastructure project teams need to innovate more to achieve better value and project outcomes. It’s also true that the sector needs to be much more effective at learning from experience when delivering new projects.
These two statements may seem contradictory – one looking back and one forward. In fact, they are complementary.
For one thing, innovation is always a learning process. A learning organisation is one that can reflect on and analyse the lessons from things that went well and those that didn’t. It can identify how innovations and ideas can be refined and applied more effectively on future projects.
In the non-learning organisation, this process of reflection and sharing rarely happens and the lessons are lost.
Use Everyone’s Experience
Taking a broader view of project success, one that brings in whole life costs and social value, for example, means that a wider scope of experience becomes relevant. Operating and maintenance partners have their own experiences to bring to each project.
A similar argument applies with the project legacy. Whether it’s jobs, skills or strengthening local supply chains, there are many organisations with the experience and local knowledge to inform what we do; if we don’t engage them we are basically guessing.
Safety is a further key aspect of project performance. Learning from experience is essential if you want to change the culture around health and safety. Osborne’s highly regarded STOP Think! programme has proved how it’s possible to share lessons to help drive behavioural change.
Asset Performance
Major infrastructure projects are still too often delivered late and over budget. This brings the risk that the focus of future projects becomes narrowed to these two parameters. The lesson we’ve learned is that this can be to the detriment of other performance outcomes.
It’s important to understand who will safeguard the operational requirements to ensure that cost or timing-driven changes don’t compromise the ultimate performance of the asset.
To do things better we need to innovate and we need to learn from experience – being a learning organisation means that we are able to do both.
