Peter loved his chocolate chip cookies, but he liked this conversation with Trish and Nan even more. Holding his hands over the side of his chair to brush the cookie crumbs off them onto the ground, he added "And his discussion of wishful thinking was really insightful."

In 1997, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts adopted a bill proposed by the third grade class of a school in Somerset, and thereby designated the chocolate chip cookie as the official state cookie of Massachusetts. Photo courtesy Lara Schneider.
Nan broke off a tiny chunk of her cookie, ate it, and sipped her coffee. "Mmmm, I thought so too," she said. "Knowing that we fall into these fallacy traps because of our humanness made me more accepting of it, less guilty."
Trish was puzzled. "Yeah, but how does that help the project?"
"That's just it," said Nan. "Knowing that the fallacies are part of being human makes it easier to acknowledge these errors when we make them."
Peter finished Nan's thought. "And that way we can own up to them faster, maybe even before they do any damage."
Fallacies aren't just false. Because they have a deep connection to what we are as human beings, they'll never go away. Here's Part III of a little catalog of the fallacies of project management. For Part II, see "Nine Project Management Fallacies: II," Point Lookout for December 14, 2005, and for Part IV, see "Nine Project Management Fallacies: IV," Point Lookout for January 11, 2006.
- 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.
- The Linearity Fallacy
- Fallacies have
a deep connection
to what we are
as human beings - This fallacy holds that the human effort required to execute a project scales in proportion to project attributes such as project size or total budget.
- Not only do operating costs per unit of output grow rapidly with project size, but the converse is also true: costs decline unexpectedly slowly as we scale the project down in size. This happens because we have difficulty abandoning control processes as we move down in size. We lose in both directions.
- Project management is an inherently nonlinear activity. The complexity of an effort grows not in proportion to the effort, but combinatorially with the size of the effort, following the growth in the number of possible person-to-person interactions with increasing team size.
These two fallacies both arise because of our hopes and wishes. We long for a world where we can substitute any person for any other; for a world where doubling resources halves the schedule. But longing doesn't make it so. In the next and final installment of this series we'll look at fallacies that arise from failures of critical thinking. First issue in this series
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Related articles
More articles on Project Management:
Quantum Management
- When we plan projects, we estimate the duration and cost of something we've never done before. Since
projects are inherently risky, our chances of estimating correctly are small. Quantum Management tells
us how to think about cost and schedule in new ways.
Bois Sec!
- When your current approach isn't working, you can scrap whatever you're doing and start again —
if you have enough time and money. There's a less radical solution, and if it works, it's usually both
cheaper and faster.
More Limitations of the Eisenhower Matrix
- The Eisenhower Matrix is useful for distinguishing which tasks deserve attention and in what order.
It helps us by removing perceptual distortion about what matters most. But it can't help as much with
some kinds of perceptual distortion.
Planning Disappointments
- When we plan projects, we make estimates of total costs and expected delivery dates. Often these estimates
are so wrong — in the wrong direction — that we might as well be planning disappointments.
Why is this?
Joint Leadership Teams: OODA
- Some teams, business units, or enterprises are led not by individuals, but by joint leadership teams
of two or more. They face special risks that arise from the organizations that host them, from the team
they lead, or from within the joint leadership team itself.
See also Project Management for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
Coming September 3: Contributions in Team Meetings: Advocating
- An agenda in the form of an ordered list of topics might not provide an appropriate framework for a given meeting. For example, if A depends on B, and B depends on A, we must find a way to discuss A and B together in some orderly fashion. Here are some alternatives to linear, ordered agendas. Available here and by RSS on September 3.
And on September 10: Contributions in Team Meetings: Scoping
- Some meetings focus on solving specific problems. We call them "working sessions." More often, we delegate problem solving to task teams, while meetings wrestle with the difficult task of identifying or "scoping" problems rather than solving them. Scoping discussions can be perilous. Available here and by RSS on September 10.
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