Paradox of project planning

Cobb's Paradox - "We know why projects fail; we know how to prevent their failure – so why do they still fail?" is a statement made by Martin Cobb's in 1995 while working for the Secretariat of the Treasury Board of Canada. This statement was made in relation to attending The Standish Group's CHAOS University, where a number of IT projects were analyzed and found to be failures. The paradox highlights that even though project management is applied to a project that it does not guarantee success. The factors that impact any project are countless and it is up to the project manager to find a path through this "jungle" of choices. In some projects control is need to focus people on the task at hand, and in other projects freedom is need to generate new ideas. Grasping project management is often described as dealing with a chaordic system, which implies there is both a level of order and chaos in the nature of projects. The goal of the project manager is to attempt to use both these two warring forces to create a successful project.

Why do projects fail?

In project management Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) is used in most companies to identify whether success is being achieved. The practices

Why do we fail?

• Bias
  • Killed through too tight control
  • survivorship bias
  • Kruger-Dunning Effect

• Risk management
  • No or little Risk management

• Resources
  • Poor allocation of (scarce) resources
  • Poor communication of goals / no set milestones

Risk & Bias management

Types of biases

WIP - Do's & Dont's / identified counters / what is the benefit? / lessons learned

Agility & flexibility

Abstract

This page will be focusing on "Cobb's paradox" which is the following statement:

"We know why projects fail; we know how to prevent their failure – so why do they still fail?"

This paradox aims at two different questions, where the first one is how do projects fail? The second questions is why practitioners of project management fail to apply their skills sufficiently to avoid failures?

Projects fail because of a multitude of reasons such as overambition, not adapting to the new situation, unexpected events occurring, etc. These projects fail because of biases (people) and risks (uncertainty). These two concepts are a part of the project management approach of how to run projects, and the issue generally lies in either not being having the ability to act on identified risks or misidentifying the risk. This happens either because the perceived risk is either underestimated and dismissed or other risk are overestimated and take up resources. Another issue is that even though people are aware of biases it is sometimes hard to identify when you are biased yourself. This leads to misidentifying key factors that can lead to project failure and not preparing sufficiently and being caught off guard.

The goal of this article is to give examples of both successful (maybe only failing not sure on this, would be to show how to recover from initial failure) and failing projects along with a list of biases. By providing a list and a examples, the reader will gain an understanding of how this rather complex concept looks "in the wild" and how they can impact a project.

References

"Definition of Paradox"

"Cognitive biases"

Englund L. Randall "Control of results manage paradox"

Bourne, Lynda & Walker, Derek. (2005). "The paradox of project control". Team Performance Management. 11. 157-178. 10.1108/13527590510617747.

Bourne, Lynda Cobb's paradox is alive and well.

Carlton, Darryl. (2017). "Competence versus Confidence in IT Project Leadership and its Impact on Project Outcomes". Journal of Modern Project Management. 5. 38. 10.19255/JMPM01304.

Burgan, S. C. & Burgan, D. S. (2014). One size does not fit all: Choosing the right project approach. Paper presented at PMI® Global Congress 2014—North America, Phoenix, AZ. Newtown Square, PA: Project Management Institute.

Svein Arne Jessen "The popularity of project work - A contemporary paradox?"

Morten Wied, "Wrong, but not failed? Resilience and brittleness in complex engineering projects"

Barry L. Linetsky, "The project management paradox: achieving more by doing less"

Eijnatten, Frans M.. (2004). Chaordic Systems Thinking: Some Suggestions for a Complexity Framework to Inform a Learning Organization. Learning Organization, The. 11. 430-449. 10.1108/09696470410548791.