Optimism will sink a project

© 2014, Cognizant Technology Solutions. All Rights Reserved.

Greg Hyde

Senior Director

Cognizant Business Consulting, Australia

Optimism will sink a project

1 | ©2014, Cognizant

Presentation objective

To present an analysis of project leadership attitudes and organisational

cultures…

• That gave rise to a number of catastrophic events that either ended

disastrously or successfully; and

• Examine the underlying events, that helped or hindered.


Agenda

• The sinking of the Titanic and NASA’s Challenger shuttle tragedy.

• Miracle on the Hudson and Qantas Flight QF32.

• Analysis of project success and failure.

• Failure avoidance management.

• Maintaining optimism in the face of reality.

• Countering project optimism.

• Project quality and project ‘pre-mortems’.

The tragedies


Why did the Titanic sink?

• The ship’s speed was too fast for the iceberg conditions.

• The shipping company’s managing director was obsessed with crossing the Atlantic in six days, so he pressured the Captain not to slow down.

• The ship’s rivets were made of sub-standard iron and the impact caused the Titanic to break apart.

• The watertight compartments didn’t reach as high as they should have because the shipping company wanted more room for first class passengers.

• …. and it hit an iceberg!

None of these ‘faults’ alone caused the ship to sink. Together

however, disaster was inevitable.


NASA’s Apollo space program

• NASA’s management strategies in the 1960’s were “pessimistic”.

• The drive to put a man on the moon was governed to prevent failure.

• Reliability and failure avoidance motivated NASA, not efficiency.

• The core principle was to find fault before lasting damage occurred.

• Testing and analysis for failures were critical features of design and construction processes.

• Wide information channels - NASA’s leadership received lots of good and bad news.

• All critical decisions (including launch) were independently reviewed by special high-level units inside and outside the project.


Challenger shuttle tragedy

Factors contributing to the disaster*

• NASA reversed it’s Apollo strategy - focusing on cost control and scheduled launch dates.

• Adopted “success-orientated management”, assuming everything will work as specified.

• Ignored warnings, disregarding even the clearest signs that something was wrong.

• Optimism was of such a high order that when erosion of the ‘O’ rings was detected after earlier shuttle launches, they dismissed it out of hand.

• Expenditure was kept to a minimum, by eliminating failure avoidance systems; parallel development; independent checks; and tests.

• Assuming success, testing was reduced and no spare parts were built for the engines.

* The arrogance of optimism – Landau & Chisholm – June 1995

Near disasters


Miracle on the Hudson

The facts

• On 15 January 2009, US flight 1549 suffered a bird strike and lost both engines shortly after take-off from La Guardia airport.

• Captain Sullenberger discussed with air traffic control, the possibilities of returning to LaGuardia airport or attempting to land at Teteraboro Airport in New Jersey.

• Sullenberger decided that neither was feasible, and that ditching into the Hudson River was the only option for everyone’s survival.

• The crew glided the A320 over the Hudson River, before ditching it just 3 minutes after losing power.

• The plane was virtually intact, partially submerged and slowing sinking.

• All 155 occupants on the plane were evacuated safely and rescued by nearby ferries.


Capt. Sullenberger’s philosophy 1/2

• “You need to be a long-term optimist, but a short-term realist.”

• “You can’t be a wishful thinker… you have to know what you know and don’t know, and what your airplane can and can’t do in every situation.”

• Sullenberger was aware that many US Air Force pilots waited too long before ejecting from their planes…

Ejecting at too low an altitude, hitting the ground before their parachutes opened, or

Going down with their planes.

Q: Why did these pilots spend extra seconds trying to fix the unfixable?

Q: Did they fear retribution if they lost million-dollar jets? Cont/…


Capt. Sullenberger’s philosophy 2/2

• “I could have tried to return to LaGuardia so as not to ruin a US Airways aircraft. - But I chose not to.”

• “I could have worried that my decision to ditch the plane would be questioned by superiors and investigators. - But I chose not to.”

• “When it’s no longer possible to complete all your goals, you need to sacrifice lower-priority goals.

By attempting a water landing, I was sacrificing the ‘airplane goal’ for the goal of saving 155 lives.”


Flight QF32 1/2

The Airbus A380 incident

On 4 November 2010, Qantas flight QF32 made an emergency landing at Singapore’s Changi Airport after suffering a failure of the port inboard (No. 2) engine.

• Shrapnel from the exploding engine punctured part of the wing and damaged the fuel system causing multiple leaks and a fuel tank fire.

• More than 70 penetrations under the wing, 7 on top, and 500 impacts on the fuselage.

• Disabled one hydraulic system and the anti-lock brakes, causing No.1 and No.4 engines to go into a ‘degraded’ mode.

Cont/…


Flight QF32 2/2

• Damaged landing flaps and lack of controls for the outer left No.1 engine.

• Pre-landing assessment showed…

aircraft was 42 tonnes over maximum landing weight; and

centre of gravity well to the rear of the aircraft and no ability to correct.

• Landed safely after the crew extended the landing gear using the gravity drop emergency extension system, travelling 35 knots faster than normal and blowing 4 tyres.

• No injuries reported among the 440 passengers and 29 crew on board the plane.


Airbus A380 quality principle

The leadership lesson:

“Dear Richard,

Heading up the A380 aerodynamics team, our job was to make sure the aerodynamics of the wing combined with the weight of the airframe provided the best possible performance for the aircraft, consistent with meeting all the certification criteria.

The Airbus Handling Qualities group wanted an unusually high level of residual control in the event of systems failure cases, thereby providing more resilience, but resulting in a heavier airframe.

Having struggled to get close to the weight and drag targets, I was reluctant to accept this philosophy.

After your incident, I am very proud that I was overruled and that the Handling Quality group got their way.”*

* Extract from QF32 – Letter to the pilot of QF32, Richard De Crespigny


What did these incidents have in common?

• Good leadership and decision making before and during the crisis.

• Good teamwork in the cockpit and in the cabin.

• Everyone knew what they needed to do and trusted each other to do it.

• Identified faults and system generated warnings were called out.

• Regular communication from the cockpit to the crew, and as appropriate, to the passengers.

• The pilots were experienced, with thousands of flying hours.

• Regular and targeted training programs increased capability to handle mid-air situations with confidence.

• Underlying executive support for in-flight decisions made by the captain.

• Unwavering commitment to quality in the design, build and test phases for each aircraft.

Analysis of success

& failure


Project failure rates

• 50% of IT projects with budgets over $15m

o Run 45% over budget

o Run 7% behind schedule

o Deliver 56% less functionality than predicted.

Therefore, at least half the time, to achieve at least $15m in benefits requires a project spend of $59m.

- McKinsey-Oxford study on reference-class forecasting for IT projects - 2012

• 70% of organisations have suffered at least one project failure in the prior 12 months, and

• 50% of respondents indicated that their projects failed to consistently achieve what they set out to achieve.

- KPMG New Zealand Project Management Survey - 1012

There are thousands of ways for projects to fail…

They’ve all been tried and they all work!


What is success?

A project that delivers what’s required,

… and meets all expectations.

“The single best payoff in terms of project success

comes from having a good project definition… early.”

- RAND Corporation


Why aren’t some projects successful?

Some contributing factors include:

• Expectations not understood or agreed to by all parties.

• Key assumptions and risks not identified, validated or managed.

• Inadequate stakeholder engagement.

• Managing to a cost or date at the expense of quality.

• Loss of focus on the project’s business case benefits.

• Poor implementation and handover to operational teams.


An Australian saying, which means:

Whatever’s wrong, will fix itself …eventually.

“She’ll be right!”


Failure avoidance management

The law of increasing optimism

• The longer the time since the last catastrophe, the more management believes that another won’t occur.

Optimism vs Pessimism

• Optimism restricts anticipation of errors, minimises its probability, and leads to concealment of its occurrence and the severity of its effects.

• Pessimism is seen as negative, slowing down progress.

• Optimism is seen as decisive, making things happen.

Organisational design

• We need to ‘institutionalise disappointment’– make it okay to discuss.

• The key element of decision-making should not be about efficiency or optimisation, but a system of internal criticism and self-correction.


Maintaining optimism in the face of reality

• Unrealistic optimism is a pervasive human trait.

• People’s estimations of the future are often unrealistically optimistic.

• A scientific assessment* found a marked asymmetry in belief updating.

Participants updated their beliefs when information that was better than expected…. but made no allowance for information that was worse.

Regions of their prefrontal cortex (in their brains), tracked estimation errors, when these called for a positive update.

Highly optimistic participants exhibited reduced tracking for estimation errors that called for a negative update.

* Sharot, Korn & Dolan - Nature neuroscience – October 2011


Dilbert on project optimism

Countering project

optimism


Project ‘pre-mortems’

What is a project ‘pre-mortem’?

• A hypothetical opposite of a post-mortem.

• Undertaken at the beginning of the project, after the team has been briefed on the details of the plan.

• Different to a risk assessment, where consideration is given to what mightgo wrong

A pre-mortem assumes the project has already failed spectacularly.

• Project team members are encouraged to identify plausible reasons for its failure, particularly with regards to its critical components.


Benefits of project ‘pre-mortems’

• Helps identify problems early in the project’s life cycle.

• Enables the project plan to be improved.

• Reduces the optimistic attitude often assumed by people over-invested in the project.

• Team members feel valued for identifying weaknesses that no one else has mentioned.

• All participants learn from the input and experience of other members.

• Sensitises the team to pick-up early signs of trouble once the project gets underway.


Countering project optimism 1/2

1. Reduce size of projects to align with organisational capability and past success.

2. Confirm the time-cost-quality relationship with the primary stakeholders.

3. Engage primary stakeholders for all major decisions, especially scope or funding changes.

4. Know the strengths (and weaknesses) of project team members and decision-makers.

5. Undertake ‘pre-mortems’ on failure scenarios for the overall project and each critical component.

Cont/…


Countering project optimism 2/2

6. Engage the ‘real’ SMEs (subject matter experts) as early as possible

they’ll give early warning on issues impacting their area of expertise.

7. Encourage potential faults and issues to be communicated upwards and early.

8. Incorporate issue identification and rectification into project status reports.

9. Identify and assess all assumptions in terms of impact on critical components.

10. End-user stakeholders to define criteria for migrating into production / operations

don’t allow the project team to ‘dump and run’.


The last word

“Laws” of the universe

Murphy’s law: Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

Sod’s law: Anything that is to go wrong, will do so at the worst possible moment.

O’Toole’s law: Both Murphy and Sod were optimists.

© 2014, Cognizant Technology Solutions. All Rights Reserved.

Thank you

Greg Hyde

Senior Director

Cognizant Business Consulting, Australia

[email protected]

0408 204 785

mailto:[email protected]

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Optimism will sink a project

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