I know, I know… it is one day at a time. Slowly slipping a bit every day. That is true, and it is true as well that many projects get late at the very beginning, during the initial inception and planning, maybe even the very first day.
This can be caused by a number of causes: unclear goals and expectations, optimistic planning bias, lack of planning altogether, too much planning, external dependencies that go unnoticed or unmanaged, no risk identification, accepting risks without a plan to mitigate them beforehand or react to them when they happen, unforeseen and / or unexploited opportunities, you name it.
I have yet to see a project that gets delayed in the last mile, the last 20%. What I often see are projects which were late all along but whose team or leader never communicated the lateness but when it was evident they were missing the deadline. Sometimes, it is even published only after they had missed it. I often see projects that missed one milestone after another and they never changed the plan or communicated an updated timeline, as they were working hard to recover in the hope of meeting the original plan dates.
What is at the source of all these issues? I suspect it is human nature, in particular our tendencies to create plans that reproduce our hopes instead of realistic scenarios and to avoid making forecasts that will prove us wrong or worse than we would like to be. We go as far as, when we actually produced a not-so-great forecast, denying its validity and justifying how we can recover and things could actually go much better if only…
To avoid this conundrum, during inception and planning I force myself to wear my pessimist and optimist hats alternatively and check how reality looks like from that perspective. Every time I re-evaluate my project forecasts, I remember to alternate the same hats again. We only have a plan or a forecast, when we have considered the possibility of things going great with tailwinds propelling us ahead and the scenario in which things go poorly with constant headwinds slowing us down even to a halt, and then what is the most likely situation we will face and what we will do to make the most of it. Without the optimistic and pessimistic points of view, we don’t have a plan but a wish.
The Adaptive Executive 