Project Management – Fast and Slow

Klaus Nielsen, MBA, PMI-ACP, PMI-RMP, PMP is the managing director at Global Business Development in Denmark and an associate lecturer in project and program management at the IT University of Copenhagen. He has over 20 years of project management experience in managing and delivering complex, high-visibility information systems projects.

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Introduction
Within the last 50 years, we have witnessed a pyramid of project management tools and techniques. However, nine out of ten big projects (Flyvbjerg, 2013) consistently underperform in terms of costs and benefits. Such projects (Flyvbjerg, 2013) consistently end up costing more with smaller benefits than projected and almost always end up with costs that exceed the benefits. This is also an example of the planning fallacy.

The PMI Pulse of the Profession®: Capturing the Value of Project Management (2015) highlighted how the projects of high-performing organizations successfully meet goals two–and–a–half times more often, and how these organizations waste 13 times less money than their low-performing counterparts. This paper will investigate some of the human factors.

This is not a book review of Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (2013). However, it would help you greatly to read this paper if you are familiar with his work. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of Daniel Kahneman's contribution to the understanding of the way we think and choose. He is one of the most original and interesting thinkers of our time. There may be no other person on the planet who better understands how and why we make the choices we make.

After reading Kahneman’s masterpiece on human rationality and irrationality, I was curious as…

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