Chapter 3. Planning the Project

In chapter 1 I talked about the high cost of project failures. Almost every study finds that failures are caused primarily by poor project management, especially the failure to plan properly. There are two barriers to good planning. The first is prevailing paradigms, and the second is the nature of human beings.

A paradigm is a belief about what the world is like. You can tell what people believe by watching what they do, because they always behave consistently with their deeply held beliefs. It is not necessarily what they say they believe, but what they really believe that counts. Chris Argyris has called these beliefs one’s theory espoused as opposed to one’s theory in practice. (Overcoming Organizational Defenses, 1990).

To illustrate, a fellow who attended my seminar on the tools of project management later told me that, upon returning to work, he immediately convened a meeting of his project team to prepare a plan. His boss called him out of the conference room.

“What are you doing?” asked the boss.

“Planning our project,” explained the fellow.

“Oh, you don’t have time for that nonsense,” his boss told him. “Get them out of the conference room so they can get the job done!”

It is clear that his boss didn’t believe in planning, which raises the question, Why did he send the fellow to a training program if he really didn’t believe in what is taught? Go figure.

The second reason that people don’t plan is that they find the activity painful. Some individuals, especially engineers and programmers, are concerned that they will be held to estimates of task durations that they have made using their best guesses. Because they have no historical data to draw on, this is all they can do. But they also know that such numbers are highly uncertain, and they are afraid that failure to meet established targets will get them in trouble. As one of my engineers told me once, “You can’t schedule creativity.”

I replied that this may be true, but we must pretend we can, because no one will fund the project unless we put down a time. Since then, I have changed my mind—you can schedule creativity, within limits. In fact, there is no better stimulus to creative thinking than a tight deadline. If you give people forever, they simply mess around and don’t produce anything.

Nevertheless, we find that, when people are required to plan a project, they find the activity painful, and they resist the pain it causes. The net result is that they wind up on the pain curve numbered 1 in Figure 3-1. The net result of being on this curve is to experience a lot of pain, because the total pain experienced is represented by the area under the curve.

In curve 2 of the figure, there is a lot of pain early on, but it diminishes over time, and the total area under the curve is less than that under curve 1.