Projects of all kinds routinely fail to deliver on time, on budget and to specification; yet people continue to fall foul of ‘the planning fallacy’ – the tendency to underestimate the time, the costs, and the risks of future actions and at the same time overestimate the benefits of the same actions.
There are many explanations of why things rarely go according to plan. In this presentation I focus on irrationality and complexity; two important reasons why, in the words of former World Heavyweight Boxing Champion Mike Tyson, “Everybody has a plan, until he gets hit.”
I introduce some planning, monitoring and evaluation (PME) approaches as part of ‘a humble project
management checklist’ to guide us before, during, and after we get hit. I see these as ‘humble’ PME approaches because they serve to remind us that we need to understand and value the perspectives of
others so that we can see beyond our imperfect knowledge and perceptions.
Dr. Mauremootoo has over 30 years of experience in project planning, implementation,
monitoring, and evaluation. In his own words “Through sweet and bitter experience, long discussions and a lot of reading and reflection, I am continually learning what distinguishes effective and ineffective projects. This experience is the raw material for the humble project management checklist.”
He gave a talk on 11 June 2015 at the LT2 of the New Academic Complex of the University of Mauritius
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