Fundamentals of Project Management, Third Edition

Chapter 3. Planning the Project

In chapter 1 I talked about the high cost of project failures. Almost every study finds that failures are caused primarily by poor project management, especially the failure to plan properly. There are two barriers to good planning. The first is prevailing paradigms, and the second is the nature of human beings.

A paradigm is a belief about what the world is like. You can tell what people believe by watching what they do, because they always behave consistently with their deeply held beliefs. It is not necessarily what they say they believe, but what they really believe that counts. Chris Argyris has called these beliefs one’s theory espoused as opposed to one’s theory in practice. (Overcoming Organizational Defenses, ...