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.

Project success & failure

Introduction

To evaluate a project and the level of success or failure is not as straight forward as one would expect. Success and failure can be perceived substantially differently, depending on whether you are a project participant or a stakeholder in the project. For an internal actor of the project the success criteria is being able to meet deliverables on time and living up to certain Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) set by senior management. For external stakeholders success is very different. Here the value generated by the project often more important. It is important to involve these stakeholders so their expectations are met. Even if a project is success internally, it can be a failure if users of the output of the project do not feel the project aligns with their interests.

Project success

Self evaluation

One of the traditional ways to self asses is by the Iron Triangle. The Iron triangle consist of three ground pillars and is used to set KPI's. Companies use this tool to self asses whether a project is living up to the estimated expectations.

1. Time
   All projects are limited by time, and deliveries must fall with in the expected time frame in order to be considered a success.
2. Cost
   Projects are often projected to have a certain cost and hence receive a budget based on this estimation of cost. Often competing projects bid for the same budget funding. This causes the bidders to lower their budget expectations, which in turn leads to lowering the quality of the project.
3. Quality
   The previous two legs focus on how the project is executed, while quality focuses on the output of the project. The higher the quality the higher the value generation of the project.

In the triangle it is impossible to run a project that produces maximum value in all three perspectives as they coexists as trade-offs between each element.

Why do projects fail?

In project management is used in most companies to identify whether success is being achieved. The practice is an attempt reduce complexity

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.

Bourne, L. (2007). Avoiding the successful failure. Paper presented at PMI® Global Congress 2007—Asia Pacific, Hong Kong, People's Republic of China. Newtown Square, PA: Project Management Institute.

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.

Jessen, Svein. (2010). The popularity of project work - A contemporary paradox?. Problems and Perspectives in Management. 8. 80-90.

Wied, Morten & Oehmen, Josef & Welo, Torgeir & Pikas, Ergo. (2021). Wrong, but not failed? A study of unexpected events and project performance in 21 engineering projects. International Journal of Managing Projects in Business. 14. 10.1108/IJMPB-08-2020-0270.

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.