Wrong, but not failed - A study of unexpected events and project performance in 21 engineering projects

This studied the relationship between unexpected events and project performance in 21 projects (which were evaluated 3-12 years after project completion).

It’s argued that traditional project management theory often highlights inaccurate foresight, optimism biases and poor planning as key causal factors in unexpected events throughout the project lifecycle. Instead, these authors sought to explore how projects can rebound from unexpected events, without foresight, using resilient systems theory.

They further argue that efforts to prevent these issues have focused on things like “de-risking” plans and “de-biasing” planners, seeking to close the gap between planning and reality. Quoting the paper, “While this has weeded out poorly conceived projects and unmasked deceptive planners, there is little evidence that this has improved net performance over time as projects have simultaneously become larger and more complex” (p2).

As they further argue, growing recognition from complex projects is that unexpected events can’t be completely eliminated by upfront planning regardless of the level of sophistication. In order to bolster the “traditional” methods, they suggest the paradigm shift towards increasing potential for resilient properties may be an interesting area of research.

Resilient properties are defined as “any characteristic of a project, which allowed project performance to resist or recover, despite, or because of, unexpected events”. They further include the idea of bouncing back from negative unexpected events and bouncing forward from positive events. These ideas see a focus from “planning the journey” more to “planning *for* the journey” (emphasis added, p2).

I found this to be a tough paper to summarise – it has a complicated methodology and writing style and somewhat complicated and interconnected findings. Thus, I’ll only focus on a few of the multiple findings.

Results:

Overall, found was that despite multiple layers and independent quality reviews and checks of project plans, the authors still identified significant unexpected events in all 21 projects. Significant unexpected events led to underperformance in about half of the sample projects. From this data, changing of requirements, technical problems, planning error and demand changes were the most common types of events encountered.

Interestingly, it’s stated that despite sophisticated upfront planning and independent planning reviews significant unexpected events still occurred and that “eliminating planning error as a factor does not change this finding” (p18).

Furthermore, found was that negative assessments of project characteristics didn’t necessarily relate to project underperformance and that projects were able to resist, recover or underperform based on factors not related to budget, schedule, plan, or prior expectations.

It’s argued that these findings support the premise of resilience theory as applied to project management, where some projects inadvertently or by design had properties which allowed them to resist or recover from unexpected events, while others did not. These characteristics were separate to the factors highlighted in the paragraph above.

The finding that significant unexpected events led to underperformance in only half of the cases was said to suggest that “the ability to succeed despite, or because of, unexpected events may be a more fruitful avenue of improvement than further efforts to anticipate, prevent and mitigate unexpected events up-front” (p18).

They state that unlike traditional emphasis on projects that are “right and successful” or “wrong and failed”, this data highlights another class of properties that are “wrong, but not failed”. ?And as noted earlier, adherence to budget, plan etc. is “neither necessary nor sufficient for acceptable project performance in the eyes of stakeholders” (p19).

Of further interest is the authors’ comment “We depart from the presumption that unexpected events (necessarily) matter when they impact predetermined formal performance criteria” (p19). That is, projects don’t necessarily succeed or fail relative to formal performance criteria and compensatory project characteristics can make up for underperformance in one domain by underperforming in another.

Link in comments.

Authors: Morten Wied, Josef Oehmen, Torgeir Welo and Ergo Pikas, 2021, International Journal of Managing Projects in Business.