Organisational learning in construction: a framework from the process improvement perspective

The construction industry, one of the significant sectors of most regional and national economies, is being continuously urged to improve its performance at project and organisational level. The urgent need to improve the processes of construction projects and organisations has been highlighted in a number of industry reports. In this regard, organisational learning has been considered as essential to facilitate process improvement, innovation and sustaining the competitiveness of construction organisations, and also of the sector as a whole. Although there are a number of initiatives to facilitate organisational learning in construction contexts, literature reveals that the organisations are still finding it difficult to identify ways to effectively facilitate learning to improve their processes and performance. Therefore, this research aims to bridge the gap by developing a framework to facilitate organisational learning in construction contexts. In doing so, the process improvement perspective has been taken into consideration. Given the constructive nature of the research, design science was used as the overarching methodology. Within this overall approach, case studies were used to inform, develop and validate the research process and the outcomes. An extensive literature review, document analysis, workshops, participant observations are the key techniques used to achieve the research aim. The main outcome of this research is the framework to facilitate organisational learning within construction context. The research further highlighted the complex adaptive nature of the construction contexts and processes, and it has been incorporated into the Procurer, Provider and User (PPU) framework. In addition, the integration of the role of process maturity and time dependent meta roles of stakeholders in the context of complex construction projects, to facilitate learning and improvement, is one the significant contributions to the body of knowledge. The developed framework could be adopted by any organisations, which are contracting, consultancy, client’s organisations and/or regulatory bodies when they seek to improve their processes while facilitating organisational learning. It is recommended that industry practitioners / strategic level decision makers take consider their time and stake dependent meta-role and the resultant information flows as a basis for evaluating and updating their current organisational processes.