The visual of Obama’s Beast getting stuck on a speed hump recently was a hilarious sight. Here you have world’s most-secure car caught completely off-guard by a tiny speed hump! The visuals told a sad tale when the car literally came to an abrupt halt – the belly hinging on the speed hump and front and the rear wheels on either side of the hump. Is that how Murphy trumps your best-run projects?
How do you estimate and plan when your project has too many unknowns and uncertainties? A common shortcut and a wishful thinking is to ‘pad-up’ the estimates with some ‘magic number’ based on past experiences, like +30% effort, or +10% costs, etc. These numbers are then very carefully added at each activity and its sub-activity level. We thus end up inflating the final estimates completely beyond shape. However, many of such projects still end up with delays and cost overruns. Why?
Innovation is the new corporate mantra today. Everyone talks about it, every executive wants to showcase their fancy innovation processes, and pretty much every organization has some type of ‘budget’ to support innovation activities. However, most innovation programs don’t get too far because not too many executives and managers really understand why people don’t innovate as much as their corporate leaders would like them to, budgets and processes notwithstanding.
