quantmleap

Judging by main stream literature one would conclude that the key impediment to successful project management is deficiency in execution skills. With this I mean to include the hard skills progressively elaborated on in such project management guides like the PMBOK or PRINCE2. These include the areas of knowledge, the key processes as well as the tools and techniques required to drive a successful project. More contemporary literature, primarily promoted in leading blogs and discussion groups, expands on the importance of exercising precision while determining what DONE looks like, how percentage compete is to be objectively and correctly measured, the proper and necessary use of Earned Value Management, Monte Carlo simulations, etc.

 If I were to step back and analyze the evidence before me I would easily conclude that the ‘art’ of project management is largely dependent on the skillful execution of a set of technical recipes – the correct  carrying out of which will result in project success.

There is, however, an issue with accepting the above premise. Academic research carried out by Prof. Bent Flyvbjerg, examining transport infrastructure projects worldwide, has concluded that cost escalation is the norm and not the exception, with almost nine out of 10 projects exhibiting some level of cost overruns. It further found that cost escalation has not decreased over the past 70 years (which means that we have not been seen to be doing a better job at estimation in recent years compared with former years).

Contrasting the above with the observation that the number of certified project managers is expanding at increasing rates,  one would have to conclude that there is an apparent logical inconsistency in the lack of positive correlation between the increase in professional proficiency and the continues trend of projects’ cost over-runs.

The absence of positive correlation suggests that this logical relationship does necessarily holds true and thus should no longer be assumed to be a key factor in successful project execution. This, as we shall see later, must have profound implications on the way project managers are trained, recruited and performance managed.

I am personally convinced that the single biggest factor contributing to project failures is lack of ethical and moral considerations. Other factors are more than likely having an impact as well but their severity is compounded as a result of unethical and immoral behaviours. Accepting this as a key contributing factor to project success and failure can explain many of the observations recorded as eliciting project failures. Prof. Flyvbjerg hypothesizes in his research that the reason many projects result in substantial cost over-runs is because the estimates upon which they were approved were unrealistically low in the first place. similarly, sifting through the Ombudsman’s findings regarding Victorian public ICT projects in can be clearly demonstrated that in the majority of the cases, projects were positioned to fail before they even started, due to decisions that were blatantly either unethical or immoral. 

To summarise: In this post I have attempted to raise consciousness about the impact that ethics and morality have, in practice, on projects’ success or failure. These factors are not being given their due importance in this context and I would suggest that incorporating them into future research will find that behind spectacular failures there will frequently be hidden unethical or immoral decisions.

I will further elaborate on this point in a future post.

In the meantime…Think about it!

Related posts:

1. The Impact of Excessive Bureucracy on Project Management
2. Are Your Chances of Success Better Than Mine?