Why Most Projects Finish Late

I found a very interesting article from Samuel Okoro (CEO of Leapfrog Alliance Ltd) that answers the question I always ask myself: Why are all the projects I work on always late? I would like to share that article with you with you: http://www.projectsmart.co.uk/why-over-90-percent-of-all-projects-finish-late.html

It explains that the combination of all the different time estimates and the multitasking done during the planning, in addition to human behavior like student syndrome and Parkinson’s law during the project, results in an extremely high probability of being delayed.

“There are two psychological mechanisms at work that thwart individual attempts to protect the project against uncertainty and cause all the safety provided to be wasted.

Student’s Syndrome : […] resource persons will typically delay (probably busy working on things unrelated to the project) to the latest possible moment before commencing work on the project task. […]

Parkinson’s Law : Parkinson’s Law states that work expands to fill the time available for it. […] rather than report early task completion, the worker is likely to spend the extra time performing checks and adding nice to have “bells and whistles” not strictly required by the specifications.

Integration Requirements : Assume in a particular project that the final stage is the integration of the results of five paths. Assume again that the time estimates for each of these five paths is such that there is an 80% chance of on time completion, […] For the integration to commence on time, all the five paths must be complete. The probability of all five paths being finished in time for integration to commence is about 33%!

Multi-Project Environments : A further killer of time in multi-project environments (…engineering companies) where more than one project is going on simultaneously and resources have to be shared between the projects, is multitasking. The resulting lack of focus combined with constant “set up” requirements leads to late delivery of all the projects being worked on.”

Nicolas Pister
Hardware Product Engineer

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  • gary

    HI Nicholas,

    I will tell you why projects finish late? What I have experienced is that typically the people who estimate the duration of the projects have a fear in their mind that the duration that they are going to estimate is going to be too much and would not be acceptable by the client. So here starts the wrong estimation from the start of the first task itself which finally looks good for the client but is actually not achievable and this thing is known to the people who estimate the duration of the projects. I believe this is a pretty human behaviour. Now the clients should understand that if the required duration is not given to complete the project then the whole project goes in danger and finally then project ends late or needs to be stopped. So what I believe is that the client should demonstrate the acceptability of the duration that is good for the project which many a times is a not too much long duration.

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