“I suspect this is a big part of the constant delays and missed deadlines found in projects in larger companies.” I think a more likely explanation is that executives don’t understand the planning fallacy. A responsible project manager will overestimate the amount of time everything will take. The executive sponsor will then challenge it as sandbagging. The project manager will reluctantly improve the forecast after extracting promises of fast decisions and immediate resource availability. None of those things then happen, so the project manager’s initial forecast turns out to be true or pessimistic. I see it all the time. As an executive, I therefore assume that every project will take two to three times as long as I expect.
In-house recruiters’ variable compensation is often paid based on positions filled for a period of at least X. In the last HR department I ran, X was a year for IT positions, and 4 months for operations. If someone made it past those time lines, they were usually there for a while.
“I suspect this is a big part of the constant delays and missed deadlines found in projects in larger companies.” I think a more likely explanation is that executives don’t understand the planning fallacy. A responsible project manager will overestimate the amount of time everything will take. The executive sponsor will then challenge it as sandbagging. The project manager will reluctantly improve the forecast after extracting promises of fast decisions and immediate resource availability. None of those things then happen, so the project manager’s initial forecast turns out to be true or pessimistic. I see it all the time. As an executive, I therefore assume that every project will take two to three times as long as I expect.
In-house recruiters’ variable compensation is often paid based on positions filled for a period of at least X. In the last HR department I ran, X was a year for IT positions, and 4 months for operations. If someone made it past those time lines, they were usually there for a while.