Companion to: Why Projects Fail: Planning Fallacy, Optimism Bias, Complexity, and Weak Cost Estimating, by Paul Bolinger
Quick Summary
- Most project failure takes root before a project ever starts, in optimistic estimates that don’t hold up against real-world execution.
- The planning fallacy, hidden complexity, and weak estimating methods are the biggest drivers, and an EVMS can surface the drift but can’t fix a baseline that was never realistic.
- Paul Bolinger’s full article lays out the remedies: distributional thinking, documented assumptions, the outside view, independent review, and reduced complexity where possible.
A project can have a formal schedule, an approved budget, and a fully compliant Earned Value Management System (EVMS) and still finish late, over budget, or short of the value it promised. In a new article for the H&A EVMS Education Center, Paul Bolinger looks at why that happens so often, and why it usually has nothing to do with whether the project team knows how to plan.
The short answer is the planning fallacy: the well-documented human tendency to anchor estimates on a best-case version of the work, even when past experience says otherwise. Paul traces how that bias compounds with hidden complexity between tasks, point estimates that hide real uncertainty, and in the largest, most visible projects, outright strategic misrepresentation to get an effort approved in the first place.
He’s also direct about where EVMS fits and where it doesn’t. A properly implemented EVMS is one of the most effective tools available for surfacing cost and schedule variances once a project is underway. What it can’t do is retroactively fix an unrealistic baseline. That has to happen earlier, with better estimating discipline and a willingness to use historical data instead of hope.
Read the full article, including Paul’s five remedies and a look at the “iron law of megaprojects,” on the EVMS Education Center.