quantmleap

In “Projects failure rate – the conventional wisdom is wrong!” I’ve made the argument that despite the popular belief fueled by research studies, the real projects’ failure rate is not as concerning as some might want you to believe.

I wouldn’t have returned to this topic if not due to an article published by Neil Ryder where, yet again, he refers to the ‘fact’ that “over 80% of all projects will fail to deliver the desired functional outcome”.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Such claims cannot be  taken seriously as they, incorrectly, assume that for a project to be successful it must meet 100% of it’s intended cost, time, schedule, quality and all other objectives. This SIMPLY CANNOT BE ACHIEVED. And the reason this cannot be achieved is because as human beings we cannot achieve perfection. We can strive to perfection and we can aim at achieving high success rate across a number of the project dimensions but definitely not across all of them.

In my earlier post I made a reference to a fascinated article in “Scientific American” titled “War Is Peace: Can Science Fight Media Disinformation?” with the sub-title “In the 24/7 Internet world, people make lots of claims. Science provides a guide for testing them”. The author, Lawrence M. Krauss, states that “The increasingly blatant nature of the nonsense uttered with impunity in public discourse is chilling. Our democratic society is imperiled as much by this as any other single threat, regardless of whether the origins of the nonsense are religious fanaticism, simple ignorance or personal gain.”

I couldn’t agree more. The fast pace in which information is released and the large quantities of it do not allow us to apply due diligence and apply common sense and challenge the conventional wisdom thrown at us by experts – all claiming to provide us with their processed truth.

Related posts:

1. Projects failure rate – the conventional wisdom is wrong!