Fudge Factor

Over a series of posts I will summarize what I learnt from the excellent book by Dan Ariely “The honest truth about dishonesty” and talk about how the lessons apply to project management. It is an excellent book and one that I highly recommend that you buy.

I discovered Dan Ariely through the enlightening “Behavioural Economics” course on edx.

Why does it seem that project plans fail as soon as a project begins? One factor could be that the inputs into the project plan were not based on honest feedback.

How to get people to be more honest –

• by trying to recall moral standards improves moral behaviour.
• Moral reminders will reduce our tendency to cheat.
• ask people (even if not religious) to swear on the bible and they will be more honest
• Ask people to follow the honour code of their institution (even if there is not one)
• ask people to sign that what the form says is true at the top of the form before they fill in the form not at the end after they have cheated. this is a moral reminder to them that they must be honest.
• moral reminders e.g. religious symbol will remind people of moral obligation to be honest

How does this apply to project management?

An interesting experiment would be to apply the above points when project team members and clients provide input into the project plan. If the Project Manager can take away the risk of dishonesty from the project planning will a more accurate project plan, risk log, issue log etc be produced.

Many times it is not dishonesty that produces poor project plans but overconfidence and internal and external pressure to keep the client (internal and external) happy. No matter if the plan is achievable or not.