Foreword
Project management is a hot topic and one that’s getting hotter all the time, with chief project
oicers becoming commonplace, a ‘torrent’ of new advice and guidance being published every
year, and the Harvard Business Review referring to ‘the project economy’. Yet, there doesn’t
appear to be any significant improvement in the track record of successful delivery; projects
continue to come in late, overspend and underdeliver to an alarming degree, and Cobb’s
paradox seems truer than ever: ‘We know why projects fail; we know how to prevent their
failure – so why do they still fail?’
The really worrying thing is that, as Professor Bent Flyvbjerg has shown, the law of regression to
the tail increasingly appears to be true – there will always ...