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Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail

As soon as we get a sniff of a project that we think has a business case we just can’t seem to wait to get stuck into it. We want to start spending money on items and services that we are sure we are going to need. We don’t bother with planning. We don’t want plans we want action. Planning is time consuming. Planning is academic. We can’t plan for everything and if we spent all our time planning we would never get anything done. Plans are a waste of time. Nobody reads them anyway. Sounds familiar?

The sad fact is that few projects are well planned. The Study Work Plans and Project Implementation Plans that are prepared are done mainly to satisfy a stakeholder’s requirements. Unfortunately because they are imposed on the project the project team does not take ownership and the plans rarely see the light of day again.

The other sad fact is failing to plan is planning to fail. The Independent Project Analysis company who has collected and analysed project performance data since 1987 and now has over 13,000 projects in its database, analysing and adding some 700 projects per year, reports that project failure rates vary with project size but are still 35% for projects under $500 million rising to some 65% for projects over $2 Billion. IPA defines failure as an increase in capex or schedule by more than 25%, an increase of overall execution time by 50% or more and/or continuing major operational problems during the second year of operations that prevents consistent achievement of planned performance. IPA notes that in most cases projects rush the formative stages only to give it all back several times over during execution and early operation. IPA adds that the underlying causes are mainly self-inflicted and our experience supports that completely.

Want a different result? Then you need to do something different.

Ask us about our alternative approach to doing projects.