Paradox of project planning
Contents |
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.
History
Successful & failing projects (an example and a list with driving factors of failures and successes)
Why do projects fail?
Risk & Bias management
Types of biases
WIP - Do's & Dont's / identified counters / what is the benefit? / lessons learned
Agility & flexibility
References
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.
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.
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.
