Relating, reflecting and routinizing: Developing project competence in cooperation with others

In a world where projects represent an increasingly important organizational and economic unit, the capability of generating and executing projects becomes critical for company performance and sustainability of firm-level competitiveness. Despite recent contributions to the area of project-capability building, many of the challenges remain largely unexplored areas of research. The aim of this paper is to increase our understanding of how firms develop competence in a focal project. To accomplish this, we use an in-depth study of a complex development and implementation project. Applying a ‘process approach’ to the study of project competence, we identify three separate learning mechanisms: relating, reflecting and routinizing. We show how these mechanisms contribute mutually to the expansion and utilization of the resource base of the project.