Why projects are always late

Submitted by Mike Davies on Tue, 08/02/2011 - 14:56

Interesting research here on why our project estimations are always rubbish.

He enlisted a bunch of psychology students and asked them to estimate their completion time as accurately as possible for a particular thesis. At the end, he checked how many of them had been late. Perhaps not surprisingly (if you are also human) more than 70 percent were late. He then ran an experiment in which he asked people to make two plannings: one “if everything went as well as it possibly could” and one “if everything went as poorly as possibly could”, to see if that would make them a bit more realistic. Unfortunately, it didn’t. The majority of people still were way late, even in comparison to their most pessimistic forecast!

http://blogs.forbes.com/freekvermeulen/2011/02/07/people-always-finish-projects-behind-schedule-and-over-budget-but-here-is-some-help/

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Submitted by Adrian Gaskell MCMI on Tue, 08/02/2011 - 21:48 Profile image

Hmm, interesting stuff. Good find Mike.

Submitted by Peter Elliott CMgr MCMI on Wed, 09/02/2011 - 13:28 Profile image

Optimism Bias is a well know phenomena in relation to regeneration projects and programmes Mike and government advice has been published on how to address it:

http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/corporate/adjustingoptimism

Mind you, it appears that this may now be starting to fall from favour, at least in relation to budgets:

http://metricviews.org.uk/2010/11/optimism-bias-falls-from-favour/

Question is, if Optimism Bias adjustments aren't the answer, how can the problem be addressed?

Submitted by Jacqui Hogan FCMI on Wed, 09/02/2011 - 15:00

Did the psychology students have any project management training? If not, you cannot translate these results to real projects or programmes run by qualified and experienced project managers. If estimating time on a project was that easy we wouldn't need project managers!

From my own experience, it is usually down to:

- Inadequate scope definition e.g. 'woolly' understanding and definition of the absolute business requirements

- 'Political' scope change demands

- Lack of a robust change management process (including management of risk)

Optimism is definately a factor, but only so far as we all think 'it'll be all right on the night' and don't get the above things right. I have brought large complex projects in on time, and also know the above can be extremely hard to do.

Jacqui Hogan

http://www.cocreative.co.uk/new/?page_id=169