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 order and chaos in 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 is 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. The goal of this section is to highlight what are common ways of measuring success internally and externally. A later section will look at the drivers for failure.

Achieving success

Measuring project success

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.

The Iron triangle is however, a simplification of where success is derived from. In some cases more dimensions are added to the iron triangle to give a more complex but fulfilling perspective. Other suggestions from the literature council a different approach to success . It mentions three other pillars of project success.

1. Delivering Value
   The Iron Triangle falls into this category as the aspects of delivering value. This however also encapsulates things such as scope and how the project realizes the appropriate conditions for it to come to fruition.
2. Managing Risk
   Uncertainties is a big part of projects. The objective of a project is to try and form the future in a desired way, but often unexpected events occur that makes the future deviate from the initially chosen path. It is the project managers task to either reign the in the deviance, or choose to continue down this new path. This entire subject will be discussed later in the article.
3. Managing Relationships
   The last tenet is managing the stakeholders related to the project. The first step of doing that is defining who are the stakeholders. According to the ISO standard anyone that has interest in, or can affect, be affected, or perceive themselves to be affected are the stakeholders. This is a wide variety of stakeholders, and it is often important task to juggle as it can eat up almost all of the project managers time. It is therefore often also important to acknowledge who are the most important stakeholders as they need the most attention. This will be discussed in length in the next section.

These tenets of a successful project give a better perspective on how to achieve project success. The downside is a much higher level complexity. As seen The Iron Triangle is just a tool within a category, and similar tools can be found in the other categories. The main point is that tools such as The Iron Triangle provide the How while the boarder and more complex tenets tends to the Why. The benefit of understanding the How and the Why, are that both things are needed within a project.

Stakeholder management

Undertaking projects means creating a temporary organization . Stakeholders are defined as anyone that can be affected by the activities undertaken by this organization. It is therefore important to engage stakeholders in an appropriate fashion . The appropriate level of engagement means a need for the project manager to identify the level of engagement from each stakeholders. Some with high level of interest and power will be key players while other will only be observers and should only be monitored. If key players are misjudged and not consulted enough, they can cause troubles for any given project. The goal here is to soothe concerns and engage with actors that can benefit the project.

Risk management

Risk management is a focus on the likelihood that a given project achieves it's objectives . This refers both to minimizing potential risks while capitalizing on potential opportunities . Each project risk identified also needs to be analyzed and have an action plan attached to it. To act upon identified risks and opportunities goes hand in hand with stakeholder management, as posed risk to the project easily can come from human causes. Other risks as environmental changes such as economic collapse or natural disasters also needs to be considered. Equally to stakeholder management it is often chosen to focus on the most likely risks and opportunities.

Summary of achieving success

Each of the previous mentioned subjects are all important factors in why a project is successful. It is not enough to master just one of the aspects as it is the joined effort of all them that creates a truly successful project. Clearly managing all of them at the same time is one of the key drivers of complexity. Equally the explanation given in this article cannot convey each area in a complete fashion, as they each have multiple layers that should be explore further - this can be done in the Conceptbox . The tools provided there are all constructed so the project manager have multiple ways of approaching each of the subjects. The need for multiple tools stems from the need to contain the level of complexity, and each tool provides a different insight into how this can be done.

Another important point is also that project success is tied to stakeholders. Any project that meets time expectations and budget are not by necessarily a success if they fail to meet stakeholder expectations. Imagine a selling a project such as a house that was made just to be using cheap materials such as plastic and delivered within the time frame of 3 months, basically you could do it but it would like be more like a shed than a house and which customer are you then gonna sell it to? The importance of scoping out what the customer wants is an important task to undertake in project management.

Factors of project failure

In the previous section provides a well rounded but simplistic approach of how to be successful, so why do we often still see failures happen? 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, miscommunication, and risks are mismanaged, along with a slew of unexpected events pushing the time schedule so it becomes impossible to meet expectations. This section will cover what are some of the common mistakes made in project management. These mistakes are tightly tied to the successes as it is often because of no management or mismanagement of value, risk and stakeholder management that projects fail.

Cognitive Bias

One major reason why people mismanage their projects is because of some kind of bias. Biases comes in many different shades, but to have a bias generally means that you have some sort of blind side where your logic is flawed. Because of these flaws managers either undervalue, overvalue, or misinterpret data collected.

Survivorship Bias

Survivorship bias identifies that selection of data can also be impacted by our intuition. The most common tale of this bias is that of air plane returning during the second world war. Here the allies wanted to enforce the airplanes and were screening each returning plane for bullet holes, they then recommended to enforce the areas where there were no bullet holes at all. This was done as planes hit in these areas were not returning and hence did not survive the selection process of flying over enemy territory. This is a great example of how to actually consider the survivorship bias and counter it, but in other cases this detail has not been attended to. In some surveys of companies failed organizations might have been dropped as they no longer exists, and this falls right into misinterpreting what is happening. The importance of choosing the right kind of data can impact your ability to make decisions based on a objective perspective rather than a subjective outlook.

Dunning-Kruger Effect & Imposter Syndrome

One of the bias that can in pact a project is the Dunning-Kruger Effect . This bias is found mostly in people that have little to no knowledge of a certain field of expertise, where the individual with no skills highly over estimate their ability within the field of expertise. People with a high level of knowledge on the other hand tends have the opposite tendencies, where they develop the imposter syndrome. These two effects can in tandem ruin projects, as people who know nothing will exert their will on the project while people with a high level of knowledge will back off as they fear they might be wrong. If the project manager does not identify who within their team processes true knowledge within a field they can be led astray an focus on the wrong aspects of a project. The insight gained here is that projects can fail if participants of the project are not also treated as stakeholders, and the project manager considers all of their concerns.

Risk management

Given that risk management is a key to success there is also another side to this coin. Even well thought out projects that manage their risk can fall prey to circumstance which can cause the project to collapse. An example here is when things go wrong within a project, that the project manager is unable to control, senior management might lose faith and start to squeeze the budget while maintaining their required goals for the project. This effectively ensure that the project will fail, as the initial scope cannot be maintained because they fell behind due to the error, or they simply fall behind due to lack of funding. Risk implies there is a outcome that has negative consequences for the project, and the level of risk willingness of the project stakeholders is an important asset to manage. Even if the risk taken along with opportunities fall out in favor of the project manager, the stakeholders might thier risk tolerance have been exceeded and they no longer wish to participate in the project.

Summary of factors for project failure

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Successful failures & failing successes

Use - https://www.mosaicprojects.com.au/PDF_Papers/P046_Successful_Failure.pdf

Application for project management

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

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.