SEER Helps Avoid “Fact Free Planning”

June 7, 2008 · Filed Under Project Management  - 1 Comment(s)

While at a conference last week someone discussed “fact free planning”.  I had not heard the term before but was intrigued.  Fact free planning goes back to an article by MIT’s Sloane School, “How Project Leaders Can Overcome the Crisis of Silence”.

Fact free planning happens, in part when someone (business development, executive, etc… not one with project team responsibility)  makes commitments to stakeholders.  The article discusses how such behavior in part spawns padded estimates.

Many times project schedules and budgets come down from above without regard to project realities.

Project people pad schedule and cost estimates expecting them to be ignored or changed anyhow.  Then when several levels of managers pad or cut feeling that the estimates have been padded any semblance of reality becomes lost.

The authors go on to discuss how unhealthy organizations attempt to avoid conflict and how that conflict avoidance hides problems.

One fix for fact free planning is an environment where participants are safe in communicating truth.  SEER attempts to eliminate fact free planning by providing estimates: simulations of project realities based on ranges of probable outcomes.


Thank you for reading “Dan on Estimating”, if you would like more information about Galorath’s estimation models, please visit our contact page or call us at +1 310 414-3222.

Related posts:

  1. CMMI and SEER Applicability: Estimation, Planning & Control Processes and SEER Integration Galorath’s Ton Dekker presented this paper covering SEI’s CMMI and how SEER supports the processes for estimation and planning, monitoring...
  2. Open Source Software Is Not Free There is a great BLOG entry from someone who went back to Microsoft after a year at Google.  Some of...
  3. The Planning Fallacy Revisited This article is definitely worth a look: continuing studies that people underestimate the time and effort to perform all kinds...
  4. Software Project Failure Costs Billions.. Better Estimation & Planning Can Help There are so many studies attempting to quantify the cost of software failures.  They don’t agree on percentages but they...
  5. Just What the World Needs… Another “free” Browser… Costs Industry Big Bucks I admit I used Firefox until Microsoft’s latest, tabbed browser. At that time the tabs made a lot of browsing...

Comments

One Response to “SEER Helps Avoid “Fact Free Planning””

  1. David on June 9th, 2008 7:05 pm

    Wow – Leave it to the MIT Sloan group to have enough Chutzpah to describe a to describe a fairly common – albeit – dysfunctional program/project behavior. This is certainly a behavior common in organizations where denial is rampant – and yet rewarded.

    I look forward to the whole paper being available. It is currently available only through subscription.

    http://sloanreview.mit.edu/smr/issue/2007/summer/14/

Leave a Reply




CommentLuv badge