Third funding award for memory capture project

An interdisciplinary team of academics, led by Cardiff Business School’s Dr Jon Gosling, has been awarded £36,000 funding for a one year project on memory capture and mobilisation in public funded infrastructure schemes.

This is the third Highways England Lean Collaborative Research award since 2014 and the latest funding is provided in partnership with engineering and design firm WSP Parsons-Brinckerhoff and engineering solutions provider Costain.

The new project will pilot an innovative approach to the management of ‘lessons learnt’ in complex public funded infrastructure projects. The aim is to introduce more effective capture and mobilisation of project memories while promoting greater inclusivity to gather different stakeholder voices.

The project team combines expertise from different disciplines and fields of study bringing together research in supply chain management, knowledge management and organisational discourse and narratives.

Dr Jon Gosling and Professor Mo Naim represent Cardiff Business School’s Logistics and Operations Management section while Professor Robyn Thomas represents its Management, Employment and Organisation section. Professor Rossi Setchi from Cardiff University’s School of Engineering rounds out the project team.

Lucia Fullalove, a Lean Practitioner at Highways England, commented: “This project is very important to Highways England and it is hoped it will provide a tool to address the difficulty of managing lessons learned as well as providing a better platform for knowledge transfer across projects and organisations, preventing the re-occurrence of problems.”

Dr Jon Gosling added: “We are pleased to continue our professional relationship with Highways England. The work we have undertaken for them previously has produced excellent results, both in terms of academic outputs and impact on the practice of different organisations. We look forward to getting underway with our research project, and sharing our findings to improve memory capture and learning across large complex infrastructure schemes.”

Cardiff Business School’s previous Highways England Lean Collaborative Research projects were related to contracts and governance for large infrastructure projects (£34,000), and accelerating the adoption of Building Information Modelling among smaller tier 2 and 3 suppliers (£62,000). Download a guide developed for Highways England based on the first project for further information.

If you would like further information on the latest funded project please contact Dr Jon Gosling.