The Top Ten Reasons Projects Fail (Part 8)

Frank Winters has more than 30 years of consulting and Information Technology experience serving as a project/program manager, consultant and IT service industry executive.

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Topics: Estimating

Many people believe that estimating how long a task will take, especially if a team is involved, is a futile activity. They'd rather be told when something is needed then just get on with missing the date. With this logic, one way to avoid being fired for not delivering is to deliver something else--anything that might serve to keep the business person and the boss happy.

Others believe that it is possible to estimate with accuracy and that to do otherwise is a form of project management incompetence. You might say that most members of this group are engineers of some kind, while those with no faith in the estimating process are not. The believers also tend to be a mite uptight while the non-believers are a bit more, shall we say, free thinking. It occurs to me that each group has something to learn from the other.

Is Estimation at Fault?

Maybe using the term "estimation" as a cause of failure does not delve deeply enough. It might be that the reason for project failure in this case has more to do with how you think about the estimation process. Thinking too optimistically or pessimistically is harmful. That's the view of authors Dan Lovallo and Daniel Kahneman expressed in their July Harvard Business Review article "Delusions of Success--How Optimism Undermines Executives' Decisions."

The article isn't just about projects, it includes business initiatives …

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