Freakonomics Podcast: Why Your Projects Are Always Late — an
Freakonomics Podcast: Why Your Projects Are Always Late — and What to Do About It
This is an oldie but a goodie from the Freakonomics podcast.
TLDR:
Under-estimation of timelines and inability to complete tasks on time is driven by a number of general psychological phenomena, which can be counteracted.
1. "Optimism Bias": "everything will go great"
--> underestimating the likelihood of things going wrong
--> "Planning Fallacy": underestimating how long a task will take to complete
2. "Strategic Misrepresentation": knowingly underestimating the cost/time for a project in order to win the contract or meet the top-down requirements.
3. "Coordination Neglect": Neglecting the need for coordinating between different components/groups/etc involved in a project. Focusing on selecting the right specialized teams to perform individual tasks, but missing processes and people to connect those teams. (In other words, Project Managers!)
4. Impulse control, leading to procrastination: Yes, even experienced professional adults are not immune to this! :)
These can be counteracted by:
1. Using historical data (instead of "gut feeling" or top-down deadlines) to make timeline estimates and build in buffers for things that may go wrong. Do NOT try to think through the details of the current project: it's in the future, so no data is available, all is conjecture. This means you need to keep good records of ongoing projects to use as data for future projects.
2. Require data-based planning, but incentivize better-than-planned ("optimistic") performance.
3. Hire Project Managers, of course! (They don't say this directly on the podcast, maybe because it's obvious :) )
4. Use productivity software and behavior modifications: organize tasks, focus on one prioritized task at a time, avoid "continuous partial attention" (mental "multitasking").