Wise men say
Only fools rush in
But I can’t help falling in love with you

For two and a half years, I have been laser focused on two online dispute resolution projects. One launches next week. It is on time and on budget. The other was paused due to delay and an expanding budget. Now with the luxury of time to reflect, the same question has been churning in my brain: Why did one succeed and the other fail? Note that I struggle with labeling one project a failure as incredible progress was made by dedicated team members. Fingers crossed it will be resurrected. From now on I will refer to the ‘failed’ project as Project One and the ‘successful’ project as Project Two.

There are a few obvious factors I can point to:

• Project One started first. This allowed the team to utilize lessons learned for the successful project. Project Two was able to reuse many of the system requirements from Project One. Also, I cut my teeth on Project One and brought a more streamlined process to Project Two.
• Project One had more stakeholders or perspectives that required extensive consultation. More perspectives can sometimes lead to less alignment on goals and make decision making more complicated. Project Two had a clear decision-making hierarchy and the final decision maker was heavily involved in the day-to-day development. This allowed us to be more decisive and nimble.
• Project One had more moving parts. For example, it required legislative changes and integrations with external systems. While Project Two has more dispute areas so required more content development, there was a pattern to the work and none of the potential delay from the examples mentioned above.

But I’ve been digging deeper and am now fascinated with what can spell doom for a project before it even launches. How can we ‘guarantee’ success or at least not set a project up to fail?

Megaproject expert, Bent Flyvbjerg, and co-author Dan Gardner provide what seems like common-sense advice on the matter in their recent book, “How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, From Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything in Between”. Through an extensive study of over 16,000 projects, the authors found that only 8.5 percent of projects hit the mark on both cost and time.

In a gross over-generalization on my part, this is due to one simple factor: most projects rush in. That is, projects don’t go wrong, they start wrong. The wise approach should instead be:

Think slow, act fast

Seems like good advice but yet most aren’t following it. Are we so in love with an idea that we rush in and commit too early? Flyvbjerg and Gardner early on answer yes. I can’t possibly summarize the book in one sitting and invite you to check it before jumping into the deep end of a new project. And stay tuned for future posts delving deeper into this topic.