Training a Psycho PM

Roland Hoffmann has spent 20 years leading projects in technology, construction, marketing, operations and finance. His specialty is high-risk projects, where he prevents failure or helps to recover from one. He has honed his expertise through practice and study, including a PMP certification. He has led project teams with over 70 people on four continents, has experienced spectacular successes and remarkable failures, and learned invaluable lessons from each. More information at www.conseho.com.

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Projects need resolute leadership, which emphasizes the importance of project management decisions. They can make a project successful, but they can also make a project fail. That is why obscure human heuristics (mental disposition) and biases (personal inclinations) are so important. Project managers need to know how heuristics and biases influence decisions, along with firmly commanding traditional decision-making techniques. Therefore, successful project management training addresses the natural human variables along with project management science to teach effective decision-making. 

Project managers should mind three particular heuristics: anchoring, availability and representativeness, since they prevent true objectivity. Psychology-lexicon.com offers these definitions: 

• “Anchoring: a mental shortcut that involves using a number or value as a starting point, and then adjusting one's answer away from this anchor
• Availability: refers to a mental rule of thumb whereby people base a judgment on the ease with which they can bring something to mind.” 
• And psychcentral.com defines representativeness as “a common fallacy wherein people determine the probability or frequency of an event based on assumptions or past experience.” 

For example, anchoring arbitrarily skews estimates despite factual …

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