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This study aims to establish whether software companies learn effectively from past implementation projects to enhance future project outcomes. Key themes of project success from existing literature, together with analysis from our deductive and inductive survey, produce a thematic framework which is subsequently used to generate recommendations for improvement of organisational learning in software projects. We conclude that inherent technological and organisational complexity in these projects results in learning outcomes that fail to address core issues sufficiently. This is mainly caused by a lack of commitment to organisational learning from projects, the difficulty in extracting meaningful lessons from complex projects and the organisations' short-term business models focused on sales generation at the expense of improving project outcomes. Recommendations are made for reshaping organisational strategy by introducing cross-functional responsibility for project outcomes, committing to project learning and knowledge management across business units, and targeted competency development for project managers. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.