My book’s official publication date is only a week away. In my last post, I talked about Chapter 1. In this post, I will talk about Chapter 2. Both these chapters discuss cost growth and schedule delays and their connection with project performance. In my initial manuscript this covered only one chapter, but that was when the book was focused solely on defense and aerospace. McGraw-Hill required me to expand the scope to consider all projects. Once I had done that, I realized that I had close to 60 pages of material, so I decided to split the initial chapter in two. There was a natural split part way through this material. The first section focused on the what of cost growth and schedule delays, while the rest provided rationale for the why. As a native of the southeastern United States, I grew up in a rich storytelling tradition. My family related everything to narratives. Once I started college, I soon realized I had to base my thinking on facts and logic. However, after getting my Ph.D. and started working in the real world I realized that people think in narratives, so the best way to communicate my work was through the use of stories. Chapter 1 is the college version of cost growth and schedule delay, while Chapter 2 provides the narrative context and helps the reader understand the drivers of these interrelated phenomena.
I discuss a variety of reasons for cost growth and schedule delays in Chapter 2, but in this post I will focus on one I think may be the most important internal reason for increases in cost and schedule. This is optimism. It is so prevalent and has lasted for so long in spite of all the evidence to the contrary that it has been likened to a cult. One of the most infamous cult leaders in modern history was Jim Jones. He founded the Peoples Temple cult in
Indiana in the 1950s and in the late 1970s relocated to Guyana, a small country in South America. There he founded a city he named Jonestown. After a Congressional delegation came to investigate reports of human right abuses, the cult murdered them, along with some cult members who wanted to leave. This culminated in a mass
suicide where more than 900 people drank a cyanide-laced drink that was like Kool-Aid. Blindly following the planning fallacy optimism promulgated by project managers and other senior leaders is said to be “drinking the Kool-Aid.”
There are a variety of reasons for optimism in project management. One of the most prominent is the planning fallacy, an innate human bias noted by the psychologists Daniels Kahneman and Amos Tversky. They noticed that people plan not for the worst case or even the most likely outcome, but the best possible scenario. This sets up projects for cost and schedule growth at their inception. The cure for this tendency is to recognize it is a problem and to seek out independent estimates of cost and schedule. Project managers need to be receptive to critical voices. I have seen all too often leadership is not willing to listen when they plan for a low number but estimators point out that every historical analogy has cost 2 to 3 times as much. The resistance to optimism and the need for independence is embodied in the phrase “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid.” Independent estimates and cross-checks of project estimates can aid with the achievement of this goal.
My book’s release date is November 3rd, but you can pre-order now from Amazon or Barnes and Noble. You can also watch a 10-minute video overview on YouTube and read Chapter 1 for free.