Your project plan is a lie—but it doesn’t have to stay that way.
Ever feel like your project plan was doomed from the moment you hit ‘save’? You’re not alone. Most project managers make the fatal mistake of actually believing their own schedule, ignoring the psychological traps and external forces waiting to tear it apart.
In this video, we break down the 10 most common planning failures—from the ‘Planning Fallacy’ to the ‘Complexity Effect’—and give you the tactical fixes to make your next project bulletproof. We’re moving beyond the software and looking at the real-world reasons why things go wrong.
In this video, you’ll discover:
- Why ‘Murphy’s Arrogance’ is ruining your risk registry.
- How to combat Requirement Creep and Hero Pressure before they tank your timeline.
- The #1 biggest planning failure that kills more projects than anything else.
This video is safe for viewing in the workplace.
This is learning, so, sit back and enjoy
Why Do My Plans Go Wrong?
The second biggest planning failure is to believe your plan.
In this video we look at 10 reasons why your plans go wrong. And I’ll end by telling you what the biggest planning failure is.
Our planning often lets us down, so to avoid some of the common mistakes, here is a list of ten common things that go wrong with plans and what you can do about each of them.
1. Planning Fallacy
Perhaps the commonest reason why plans go wrong is the tendency to under-estimate the time, cost, or resources you’ll need. This is due to over-optimism about what you can achieve.
Solution: Red team review. Ask someone else (or a team of people when dealing with a large, complex plan) to review your plans with a skeptical eye. While we all typically over-estimate what we can achieve, most of us equally have a more realistic view of what others can do.
2. History Neglect
Another common failure is not looking back and learning from the lessons of the past, leading us to repeat the same mistakes.
D’oh.
Solution: A deliberate process of reviewing all relevant recollections, records and data.
3. Narrow Focus
If you focus too much on your project’s tasks, you can find yourself ignoring external factors that will impinge on what you are doing.
Solution: Put your head over the wall and look around at what else is happening in your team, your organization, and your social and commercial environment. Ask what trends can affect what you are doing.
4. Competition Neglect
Related to Narrow focus, one specific source of planning error is to ignore the actions of other people or organizations that are, in some way, competing with you. It is in their interests to seize resources, misrepresent your situation, or to change to environment in which you are operating.
While narrow focus refers to benign or neutral forces, competition neglect addresses potentially malevolent interests.
Solution: Consider role-playing a simulation, taking the perspective of a potential competitor, to identify their possible strategies and how they may affect your initiative. Or get someone else to red-team it.
5. Illusion of Control
Two things combine to create the illusion of control:
- the tendency to ignore events and forces that are out of your control and focus only on those that you can determine, and
- the belief that we can control events that are, in fact, outside our control.
Solution: Look for the critical point where your plan can fail and focus on that. Control what you can control and monitor everything else constantly, so you are ready to act on any changes.
6. Murphy’s Arrogance
Murphy’s Law says that:
‘if anything can go wrong – it will go wrong.’
Murphy’s arrogance is acting as if you are special; that Murphy’s Law does not apply to you.
Solution: Conduct a pre-mortem. Before you finalize your plan – and certainly before you start work on delivering it – think about everything that could go wrong and amend your plan to deal with each possibility, according to its seriousness.
7. Hero Pressure
Have you ever succumbed to the temptation to accept a heroic – but impossible – challenge? That’s hero pressure. It may bring out the best in us, in some ways, but succumbing also leads to wasted effort.
Solution: It is hard to spot hero pressure until it is too late. But your friends and colleagues can see it coming and recognize in you the tell-tale signs. The solution is therefore to ask a trusted colleague to act as a critical fried or mentor, to say:
‘Hey, look out!’
8. Requirement Creep
The world changes, people change their minds, or they realize they got it wrong. Some people even take any opportunity to take advantage. You have a project… So,
‘Could you just…’
are the three words you should fear above all others.
Solution: Constantly and pro-actively review what is needed and, when needs change or new opportunities arise, evaluate them objectively.
9. Complexity Effect
We often underestimate the time, budget and resources that we will need, to cope with the complexity of inter-dependencies. Unlike narrow focus, where we don’t see the complexities, here, we just oversimplify them. The complexity effect kicks in as soon as people need to work together, or you need co-operation from other agencies.
Solution: Where you can: simplify, and where you cannot: build in contingency.
10. Black Swans
Nassim Nicholas Taleb named the Black Swan effect in his book of the same name. It stands for those unknowable future events that sometimes catch us out. The planning risk is that you focus on what you know and are over-confident in your belief that
‘All you know is all there is.’
Solution: In the face of uncertainty and rapid change, the most valuable single piece of information is your goal: what matters most. In military language, this is the ‘commander’s intent’ and gives every officer the context within which to make decisions in the face of changed circumstances and an inability to communicate with their commander.
Summing-up Why Plans Go Wrong
I have offered ten solutions on a one-to-one basis, matching each to a single planning problem.
But each solution can address multiple problems.
And each problem can deserve several fixes.
Mix and match these ideas to make your plans as robust as you can. Rigorous planning is one of the secrets to project success. So, if you’re wondering what the biggest planning failure is:
The biggest planning failure is to fail to plan
Recommended Videos to Help with Planning
Carefully curated video recommendations for you:
- The Key Deliverable of Your Project Plan | Video
- Project Planning Process – How to Build Effective Project Plans | Video
- Scenario Planning: 5-Step Process to See the Future
- Contingency Planning: How to Create a Contingency Plan
- What if? 10 Things to Build into Your Project Contingency Plan | Video
- How to Use Machine Learning in Project Estimating, Scheduling, & Planning
- What is Rolling Wave Planning?
Recommended Articles to Help with Planning
- Planning Performance Domain: How to Plan a Solution to Meet Your Goals
- Project Planning Process: Navigate the Many Steps You Need
- Project Planning Mistakes and How to Avoid the 12 Most Scary Ones
- Capabilities-Based Planning: A Full Primer for Better Project Definition
- How to Restore Order: Your Ultimate Guide to Project Replanning
What Kit does a Project Manager Need?
I asked Project Managers in a couple of forums what material things you need to have, to do your job as a Project Manager. They responded magnificently. I compiled their answers into a Kit list. I added my own.
Check out the Kit a Project Manager needs
Note that the links are affiliated.
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For more of our videos in themed collections, join our Free Academy of Project Management.
