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Why overplanning makes projects fail?

sanju.sh

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Re: Why overplanning makes projects fail?

#21

Post by spikey_sanju »

perrygeo wrote: post #18

I've noticed one obvious commonality to failed projects: the plans are made in a vacuum of information, before data is gathered. This leaves land mines everywhere in the execution path, leading to big risks and large error bars on estimates. Instead of course correcting to any new data, failed projects tend to double down on the process. Even as more information comes to light, it gets systematically ignored in favor…

Plans are guesses... treating them as facts is the real danger. Adapt as you learn, or they become traps.

Re: Why overplanning makes projects fail?

#22

Post by AnimalMuppet »

jiggawatts wrote: post #14

“It’s too hard to change the plan now.” That one sentence alone is enough to explain the failures and I’m not even accounting for the very real cost overheads of planning. Don’t try to change this! You can’t convince a PM that their job is not needed, their pay depends on it being a necessary function and they will fight dirty to protect that income no matter what.

The very real cost and time overheads of planning.

It's not just that the plans are too rigid. It's not just that you don't know enough to plan in that much detail. It's that the planning takes time that you could be doing something useful with.

Note well: I am not advocating for no planning. I am against over planning.

Re: Why overplanning makes projects fail?

#23

Post by hermitcrab »

>A scientist found mold in a petri dish that killed bacteria—and boom, we got penicillin.

Casually leaving out the vast effort of a whole team of people to develop the drug:

https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/how-was...

Fleming gets the credit, but Florey and a whole team of people of other people did the hard work.

Re: Why overplanning makes projects fail?

#24

Post by elpocko »

spikey_sanju wrote: post #17
Nina1000 wrote: post #16

This is a great reminder of how unexpected success often comes from things we don’t plan for. Focusing too much on perfection can sometimes limit creativity, but you can’t just sit back and wait for things to happen either. It’s all about balance.

This is the whole point of the post... Success rarely comes from what we aim for—it’s often about timing & flow. Perfection can hold us back, but staying open leads to breakthroughs. Few irl examples: 1. Spend hours perfecting a video, 100 views. Post a raw clip, and it goes viral. 2. A polished product flops, but a scrappy weekend tool takes off. 3. A masterpiece gets ignored, but a casual sketch goes viral. 4. A fa…

lol, your "irl examples" are fantasies, made up on the spot by you to support your own made-up claim that "Success rarely comes from what we aim for". You should at least google some of the existing but exceedingly rare examples so your claims are not just hot air.

Re: Why overplanning makes projects fail?

#25

Post by spikey_sanju »

elpocko wrote: post #24
spikey_sanju wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the whole point of the post... Success rarely comes from what we aim for—it’s often about timing & flow. Perfection can hold us back, but staying open leads to breakthroughs. Few irl examples: 1. Spend hours perfecting a video, 100 views. Post a raw clip, and it goes viral. 2. A polished product flops, but a scrappy weekend tool takes off. 3. A masterpiece gets ignored, but a casual sketch goes viral. 4. A fa…

lol, your "irl examples" are fantasies, made up on the spot by you to support your own made-up claim that "Success rarely comes from what we aim for". You should at least google some of the existing but exceedingly rare examples so your claims are not just hot air.

Made up? Hardly. I hear you, but reality isn’t as tidy as a research paper. Planning only gets you so far; timing and luck do the rest. IYKYK!

Re: Why overplanning makes projects fail?

#26

Post by jiggawatts »

spikey_sanju wrote: post #20
jiggawatts wrote: post #14

“It’s too hard to change the plan now.” That one sentence alone is enough to explain the failures and I’m not even accounting for the very real cost overheads of planning. Don’t try to change this! You can’t convince a PM that their job is not needed, their pay depends on it being a necessary function and they will fight dirty to protect that income no matter what.

"It's too hard to change the plan now" +1 Agreed. Plans fail when sticking to them matters more than adapting... TBH, the best plans know when to shift. Flexibility > Rigidity

This sentence isn't something I made up, it's a sentence I heard this week.

A project started a year ago, planning an infrastructure (cloud IaaS) deployment of a complex product 12 months into the future.

Now, there is a turnkey software service (SaaS) version of the product that covers the same features and more for less money and takes literally seconds to spin up.

They're stuck in the mud trying to work around complex network routing, split-DNS, and other issues with the IaaS solution. They're going to spend months applying workarounds to problems that don't need to be solved because the SaaS version has none of those problems. They're already starting to talk about getting MFA and SSO integrated Q1 next year even though the SaaS uses MFA+SSO by default.

It's incredible how much inertia these things build up, and how much time, effort, and money is wasted "sticking to the plan" even if those plans are invalidated by changes to reality.

If the project manager simply said "let's rip up the plan and use the SaaS", they'd instantly make themselves redundant and might actually be let go when their contract is up for renewal. If they keep "fighting the fight" to make a bad plan succeed, then they're the hero and will be gainfully employed for the foreseeable future.

Re: Why overplanning makes projects fail?

#27

Post by xyzzy123 »

perrygeo wrote: post #18

I've noticed one obvious commonality to failed projects: the plans are made in a vacuum of information, before data is gathered. This leaves land mines everywhere in the execution path, leading to big risks and large error bars on estimates. Instead of course correcting to any new data, failed projects tend to double down on the process. Even as more information comes to light, it gets systematically ignored in favor…

Most good plans will have actions / tasks that reduce risk or uncertainty as highest priority.

A good heuristic in the absence of a detailed high level plan is "work on the highest risk things first".

Re: Why overplanning makes projects fail?

#28

Post by from-nibly »

hermitcrab wrote: post #23

>A scientist found mold in a petri dish that killed bacteria—and boom, we got penicillin. Casually leaving out the vast effort of a whole team of people to develop the drug: https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/how-was... Fleming gets the credit, but Florey and a whole team of people of other people did the hard work.

Presumably while having a plan

Re: Why overplanning makes projects fail?

#29

Post by ElevenLathe »

Fake planning is the real evil. This is the kind where your entire quarter/fiscal year is spoken for in an elaborate tree of initiatives/milestones/epics/tasks painstakingly negotiated over months by your boss and many other parties without any input from you. First day of the quarter, you are invited to learn what inscrutable drivel is written in your tickets, and what totally random time estimates it has been given. Since this is immutable now and your performance review depends on being seen to have completed it, you start plotting ways to trick various people into explaining what they thought they were writing down. Of course you're also "doing agile" so you have to pack all these tickets into "sprints" (a synonym for fortnights). Since all your work for the quarter is already known, this is a simple matter of deciding on day 1 the exact order you will work on it all for the next 3 months. Any deviation from this plan is considered unprofessional. You are doomed. You pour a cocktail, boot your workstation and log into your daily standup with the other prisoners. It's a beautiful day but you'll be inside playing with JIRA and arguing over the meaning of "implement" versus "create" with a "technical PM" that doesn't know what Linux is.
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