The one-sentence summary

There are a consistent set of factors that cause projects to be a success or fail spectacularly.

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WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

  • Grand visions can be inspiring but frequently they never materialize because the project becomes a disaster. The universal drivers that make the difference between success and failure are psychology and power. An optimistic approach is often disastrous, and power struggles often lead to inappropriate decisions, overspends and sometimes even failure to complete the project at all.
  • The author has created a database of more than 16,000 large projects which shows that only 0.5% of them are on budget, on time and on benefits (or better). Less than half are on budget, and only 8.5% are on budget and on time. In other words, the iron law of project management is that they are always over budget, over time, and under benefits.
  • To rectify this, think of a project as being divided into two parts – planning and delivery. Do not rush into delivery before thinking everything through properly first. The author calls this: make haste – slowly, or think slow, act fast. Imaginative leaps belong in planning, not delivery.
  • Projects don’t go wrong – they start wrong and rapidly get caught in a break-fix cycle, because problems weren’t anticipated. This is often because of too much optimism. When you take a plane flight, you want the flight attendant to be an optimist, not the pilot.
  • The planning fallacy shows that people commonly underestimate the time required to complete tasks even when there is information available that suggests that the estimate is unreasonable. The physicist Douglas Hofstadter dubbed it Hofstadter’s Law: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”
  • A bias for action sounds impressive but it is in fact a bias against thinking. Executives everywhere feel more productive executing tasks than planning them, but it rarely ends well because they haven’t thought it through properly.
  • WYSIATI stands for what you see is all there is, and many businesspeople assume this to be the case. But they may well not be fully informed, so the best policy is to commit to not commit until all aspects are properly investigated. That means asking questions first, rather than proposing answers. This is sometimes called backcasting: develop a description of a desired future state and then work backwards to tease out what needs to happen for that imagined future to become reality.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

  • The Latin word Experiri means to try, test or prove. It is the origin of experiment and experience. We try things out. We iterate. All this should be done in the planning stage, not the delivery stage. Pixar, for example, iron out problems first by producing animatic videos for a fraction of the cost of a real film. Such a process corrects for a basic cognitive bias that psychologists call the illusion of explanatory depth. For example, people think that they know how a bicycle works but when questioned, they usually don’t. Another good approach here is to produce a minimum viable product or even a minimum virtual product to expose problems before committing to expensive production.
  • Aristotle was an advocate of phronesis – the practical wisdom that allows us to see what is good for people and to make it happen. This is the essence of what great project management should achieve.
  • First-mover advantage doesn’t exist in successful big project management. It’s much better if something has been proven to work before and can be successfully reenacted without risk. That’s why you don’t want your project, or any part of it, to be unique or a first – it hugely increases the risk of failure.
  • A classic example of badly run projects are the Olympics. Because the chosen city is different almost every time, the projects suffer from Eternal Beginner Syndrome, in which there is no frozen experience to unthaw and deploy successfully. Those running such large projects need to remove the words ‘custom’ and ‘bespoke’ from their vocabulary, and when something works, keep it.
  • RCF stands for reference-class forecasting. That means looking at all similar projects done before and seeing what their budgets and timings were. This is far more accurate than starting from scratch.
  • Instead of milestones, the author proposes These plans are so detailed that they eliminate surprises through being frequent and precise, providing plenty of warning for adjustments to be made in good time.
  • All projects encounter problems that cannot be overcome by tinkering or redoing plans. This is called negative learning. The more you learn, the more costly it gets.
  • Successful projects have thin tails, with no surprises towards the end. Unsuccessful ones have fat tails. The most successful projects are solar and wind power, because they simply repeat modular Lego building blocks of known technology to any scale. The worst are nuclear power, Olympics, and IT.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

  • Nothing. This is a very helpful guide to ensuring successful project outcomes.