Nine Project Management Fallacies

Hey, this is just like old times! I picked up on a great post via Jack Vinson, who picked up on it via Glenn Alleman. For all you social media types, this is how the world used to work. :)

The post is titled Nine Project Management Fallacies, and was written by Rick Brenner of Chaco Canyon Consulting. As Jack points out, what's really great about this post is that it highlights many of the human factors that come along with projects. For the record, Brenner's fallacies are:

• The Fallacy of Positivism
• The Bad Actor Fallacy
• The Naturalistic Fallacy
• The Culturalistic Fallacy
• The Fungibility Fallacy
• The Linearity Fallacy
• The Normative Fallacy
• The Availability Heuristic
• The Grandiosity Fallacy

My favourite: the Fungibility Fallacy:

" The Fungibility Fallacy holds that each person produces one hour of output in one hour, and that we can substitute people for one another. Terms that suggest this fallacy are man-month, headcount, and FTE.

Often, only a few people can perform certain tasks. Using the project management tools that distinguish the skills of large numbers of unique individuals takes time and effort, and even then they produce somewhat fictitious results.

And running "lean and mean" makes the problem worse. If you count the cost of delays and lost market windows due to overloading key people, running a little "fatter and kinder" might actually be more profitable."

Regardless of whether you're in the PMP fan club or not, if you enjoy seeing academic theory getting injected with a dose of humanity ... you'll probably enjoy this post.