SEER Helps Avoid “Fact Free Planning”
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 scheules 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.
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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/