Designing a lessons learned model to improve the success of new product development in project oriented organizations

Article history: Received September 5, 2016 Received in revised format October 2, 2016 Accepted October 15, 2016 Available online October 17, 2016 Nowadays, project-based organizations need to utilize intellectual capital and knowledge to become leader in their business activities. The new approach to use knowledge based skills from one side and development of the new complicated products from the other side have increased the need for designing a lessons learned model. The purpose of this paper is to design a lessons learned model to improve the success of new product development for project oriented organizations. The study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale and distributes it among 56 experts who were well informed about various techniques of new product development and lessons learned. Cronbach alphas for all components of the survey were well above the desirable level. The results of the survey have indicated that there were positive and meaningful relationships between lessons learned components and the success of the new product development. © 2016 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.


Introduction
Professionals and executives in any organization preserve precious assets with valuable experiences and knowledge (Goffin & Koners, 2011;Holzmann, 2013).When an expert is retired, a significant amount of experiences may be lost within organization and gaining such experience increase the costs of organizations, significantly (Milton, 2005(Milton, , 2010)).Recording knowledge and experiences create organizational memory and contributes to intellectual assets (Lantada et al., 2013).In other words, many engineers and managers normally express the desire to learn from the past project experience and they normally do not learn effectively from their present projects.The failure to learn valid and valuable lessons from project experiences can be contributed to a number of cognitive and social issues (Duhon & Elias, 2008).According to Duffield and Whitty (2012), a substantial challenge for government and business project organizations is to make sure that lessons are learned and the mistakes of the past would not be repeated.The explicit management of project experience through lessons learned on project planning and execution has become of strategic importance for several firms (Tautz et al., 2010).Vandeville and Shaikh (1999) described a structured method for gathering "lessons learned" information obtained from system development projects.Weber et al. (2001) surveyed lessons learned processes and systems, detailed their capabilities and limitations, examined lessons learned system design issues, and determined how artificial intelligence technologies could add to knowledge management solutions for these systems.According to Williams (2007Williams ( , 2008Williams ( , 2009)), a key for successful project management is the capability to glean key learning's from the experience throughout the lifecycle of the project but the lessons learned from a special project would rarely incorporated into a firm's overall policies and procedures.Without a focused effort to gain on specific project learning's, lessons may be lost, mistakes could be repeated and opportunities for operational efficiency could be missed.During the past few years, there have been tremendous studies on lessons' learned and Table 1 describes different attributes discussed.

The proposed study
The purpose of this paper is to design a lessons learned model to improve the success of new product development for project oriented organizations.The study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale and distributes it among 56 experts who were well informed about various techniques of new product development and lessons learned.Cronbach alphas for all components of the survey were well above the desirable level.Based on the survey accomplished, we develop a conceptual model for the proposed study of this paper as shown in Fig. 1

Fig. 1. The conceptual model
We have performed an in-depth interview with some experts to learn more about the effects of different factors influencing on the success of new product development.In addition, we have coded every item obtained from the questionnaire in three digits.The first part of the code starts with a letter P, which represents the key point.The second part of the code refers to different interviews on various case studies and the last part states the key number in the questionnaire.For instance, PB8 represents the eighth key point from the interview on case study B. We have performed 14 interviews with experts and extracted 6 key points from the second interview, 5 key points from the third interview, 8 key points from the fourth interview, 9 key points from the fifth interview, 11 points from the sixth interview, 12 points from the seventh interview and 4 points from the eighth interview.Table 2 demonstrates the open cases, which have become clear on case study A.

Table 2
The key open issues for case study A Open code Description Index

Knowledge based system
Paying attention to intelligence equipment helps us depend on strong research and development to advance the success.

PAx1
Experience Paying attention to the fact that our new achievement has come from our past experiences.PAx2 Commitment Normally, there must be a strong believe to trust to highly educated people.

PAx3 Creativity and innovation
New product development has to be involved with all departments.PAx4 Satisfaction Taking care of human resources is the most important efforts in any organization.

PAx5 Motivation PAx6
After having extensive interview with different experts, we have prepared a questionnaire in Likert scale and distributed among 56 experts.Cronbach alpha was within desirable level.In addition, Kolmogorov Smirnov test has indicated that the distribution of the data was normally distributed.Next, we present details of our findings.

The results
In this section, we present the results of the effects of different factors associated with lessons' learned on new product development.Table 3 presents the results of t-student test.

Table 3
The results of t-student test on relationship between lessons' learned and new product development As we can observe from the results of Table 3, the relationship between new product development and lessens' learned are statistically significant.Table 4 shows the results of t-student values for different components of new product development.Again, all statistics are within desirable levels.Table 5 shows the results of t-student values on examining the sub-components of the lessons' learned.Finally, Table 6 shows the results of the implementation of lessons' learned on new product development and as we can observe there were positive and meaningful relationships between different factors associated with lessons' learned and new product development.

Table 4
The result of t-student on validating new product development

Conclusion
In this paper, we have presented a comprehensive model to the review the effects of different components of lessens' learned on the success of new product development.The proposed study has gathered all the existing factors mentioned in the literature and using various comprehensive interviews with experts determined positive and meaningful relationships between lessens' learned and new product development.The study has implemented for project-based organizations and has determined that intellectual properties were important components of such organizations.It also appears that the success of any new product development is highly influenced from the past experiences.Therefore, it is important to record all positive/negative experiences and use them for new tasks.In fact, by acquiring new capabilities and power of creativity and innovation, human capital, organizational advantages, project-based organizations can make changes.
as followsLessons learned model to improve the success of new product development

Table 5
The results of testing the sub-factors influencing on lessons' learned

Table 6
The results of the implementation of lessons' learned on new product development