Do bigger projects really fail more often than smaller projects?


Common sense and Michael Krigsman tell me that bigger projects fail more than smaller projects.  However, this does not match what I have experienced in the past. From what I have seen, project size does not have a significant impact on its odds to fail.

First – how do we define size ? Size can generally be expressed in terms of effort, which in turn drives duration and headcount.  occasionally we do run into situations which are akin to asking 9 women to deliver a baby in 1 month – but assuming that doesn’t happen , there is a logical way of arriving at duration and headcount from a WBS.  There are always compromises made between the triple constraints – scope, schedule and budget.  Once all the stakeholders agree to this – project is good to go.

Now, assuming this exercise is done – size is generally not a reason for failure any more.  The reason is that in this planning exercise, you should have covered the effort required to mitigate the risk for duration and headcount. After this planning exercise irrespective of size – all projects start on the same footing. 

It could be argued that bigger projects are harder to plan and hence should fail more. However I am not sure if this is a true statement entirely.  The reason is that planning for a bigger project is done on a larger scale with a more intense process and  will have better scrutiny than a smaller project. Since the planning effort is proportionate – size should not be an unmitigated risk after that. For example – if headcount increases, then there is more overhead on communication. But once you factor that increase into the schedule, this risk has a valid mitigation.  and so on and so on…

Then there  is the risk that we fail on execution.  This is not rare – but the question is – does it depend on size?  As an example – lets say a small project was commissioned to build a UI in 5 days.  Planning was done in an hour on a whiteboard, and the stakeholders were 2 people. It only needed one developer to write the code and test it and move it to production. Total cost was calculates as say $2000. In execution, it took 6 days to finish because one of the stakeholders was out sick for a day and hence could not clarify a requirement in time. Cost over run is $800. What is the chance that this failure gets highlighted in blogosphere? ZERO  or NEAR ZERO.  As a percentage – cost slipped by 40% and schedule slipped by 40%. But since the materiality was so low, it is not worth spending time to analyze it.  And guess what – in most cases, people won’t even say that this was a failure.

But on a project that is $10 Million in size – a 40% miss is enough to get some serious blogosphere attention. Then we need to find out what went wrong – and point fingers at the SI, the customer, the product vendor, the weather and the macro economic factors. 

My point is – as long as we compare projects and their risks apples to apples, I have not seen big projects fail any more than smaller projects. The difference is that when big projects fail, they fail SPECTACULARLY, and hence they overshadow the similar failure rates of smaller projects. Several decades later, we still talk about sinking of Titanic. Since that time, more people have probably dies of smaller accidents – but do we talk about them?

 Lookin forward to hearing your perspective on this topic…

Too much of analysis + Too little of synthesis = Sub-optimal decisions


I remember a high school lesson on analysis and synthesis – with the teacher emphasising why they should always go hand-in-hand in a complimentary manner. It apparently did not register very deeply in my mind – and for a number of years, I was a bigger fan of analysis than one of synthesis.  Higher education in engineering and management pretty much helped me firm up by belief that analysis is the big deal and this is the area I should master.  Engineering taught me more about how to break a problem into smaller parts and solve each. It did not teach me with the same vigor on how to put things together to better solve the problem.  Same deal with my MBA – I became pretty good at analyzing issues, but when I look back – I don’t think I had the same zeal for putting things together to aim at a better solution.

This craze for analysis must have some how played into my decision to take an active interest in the world of Business Intelligence too. Over a period of time, I got exposed to more and more of the challenges that my clients face. While I had a decent ability to figure out why they were having the problem, and give them advice on how to analyze the issues – I was not equipped with the tools or training on how to use synthesis and put it all back together to give a better solution that gave more value than the sum of solutions to the problems my analysis pointed out.

In real world, the best business brains have the ability to use analysis and synthesis together – and not just analysis alone.  These are people who use tools and other people to do the analysis part and come to them with the required information, and then like a master chef – they mix the parts to create an extraordinary dish. However, the fact that this type of people are few in number makes me believe that we have a fundamental issue with how our education, tools and thinking is preparing us for taking on grand challenges.

A primary reason for this is our simplistic view on solving problems. Here are three  that come to mind

1. Not all problems have exactly one root cause. But we have been taught to think that there is one such cause.  Even if our analysis comes up with 3 causes, we try harder to somehow rank them – many times artificially, till we can defined “The” root cause. And in this process, we lose out on the ability to gain a better solution by understanding the relation between all the causes. When analysts scream that a CEO has to be replaced, or when opposition screams that the President is ineffective – we lose sight of the fact that there are many things that cause issues – and it cannot be all attributed to one person. But since we are tuned to think about the world in a hierarchical fashion – and the CEO or President is visually the top node – we attribute too much to them, whether it is good or bad.

2. Over use of the 80-20 rule can be counterproductive.  We almost always find something using analysis along the lines of 80% of revenue comes from 20% of customers. And hence we think if we spend most of time and resources in making these 20% customers happy, then we are in good shape. Well…think again. If you have a large customer base, then 80% of your customers is a large enough number to drag you down in a variety of ways, using the various channels available to them to do so.

3. Analysis is always done assuming certain boundary conditions and assumptions. However, we do not always factor this when we interpret the results. Just by asking the same question in a different way – you can get a different answer. Here is a recent example. We asked a set of stakeholders – “How important is dashboarding/  graphical representation of data to you?” as a part of 10 questions in a survey. When we compiled the results, we found it was one of the least important. Around the same time, some one else had done a similar survey which asked “how often do you use charting and other graphical representations of the data you analyze?”. And guess what – the answer indicated that many of them used it quite regularly.  Eventually,after many more discussions with the people who answered the survey,  we figured that other questions in the survey had an influence on how the users answered each question.

I still think that analysis is crucial to decision-making – all I want to add is that people should not stop there. They should use the principle of synthesis and take better decisions.

Prayer And Other Aspects Of Religion – My POV


I was born and raised a Hindu. I attended my primary school in a Hindu institution, my high school in a Catholic school , my Engineering degree in a college founded by a Muslim visionary and My MBA from a Government run university . I am influenced by teachings of all these religions – and when I was in college, the student body was very left leaning, so I have read a fair amount of marxist type literature too.

On the plus side – this makes me totally tolerant of all religions – because, once you abstract it to a high level, they all say pretty much the same things. There are specifics like idol worship that are significantly different between religions, but that does not matter to me all that much. On the minus side – there are plenty of things that are not very clear for me about the concept of God, Prayer etc which frustrates me to some degree.

All these religions teach us the superiority of God over everything else, and I buy into that. But – at the same time, they also give totally human characteristics to God. This makes it hard for me – does God really need us to offer a prayer of praise?. I cannot imagine that God needs an ego boost from humans. If God were human – would we like a someone who won’t help unless we constantly sang praises?  But we do it any way – at least on occasion. Why?

What about prayer of petition? Religion tells us that God’s will is all that matters, and that we must succumb to it. If that is the case, why would we then also make prayers of petition? If God has a plan for everything – what does it matter whether we petition for something or not? 

I can see some rationale for prayers of love,charity and contrition. Our actions do not always account for all that happens to us. Hence – saying thanks and sorry to the power that accounts for the grand plan sounds logical to me. Somehow, apart from some ritualized aspects of contrition and penance – these types of prayers take a backseat.  However, there is one question in my mind – if God already made plans for everything that happens around us, what is the point in saying sorry and thank you and please?

Also, what is the need for middlemen between man and God. In a human organization, I fully understand the need for hierarchies. However, since God is über powerful – is there really a need for priests, saints etc to convey messages between us and God?

Why do we need a defined place for worshiping – like a Temple, Mosque or Church? All religions tell us that God is omnipresent, and that God is within us. Then why would I need to go to a certain place to communicate with God?

If devotion to god is not an act, and a way of life – do we really need specific days to worship? We need father’s day and mother’s day and independence day and so on because people have busy lives and in the mad rush, we do not think daily of dad and mom and the nation. We feel guilty of that occasionally, and get rid of our guilt by using an arbitrary day to take care of it. Although dad, mom and the nation could probably use more interaction with us – they are usually not in a position to change our behavior. But God is much more powerful – so if God cared about constant attention from us, wouldn’t God have done something to influence it? Since that does not seem to be the case – my theory is that God does not really care if we think about God all the time.

I think Religions serve more societal and psychological needs than spiritual needs. Having a place and time to worship brings people together, and augments the legal framework of a society with a moral framework. People resist the temptation for crime partly because of fear of God punishing them in some form on top of the society punishing them. Having God to blame for our disappointments give us a big psychological relief. Believing that God will intervene and make things right for us help us keep trying. So yes – religion does have a very valid reason to exist.

The people who founded religions probably found that it was easiest to get a following by giving God some human attributes. This would help others relate to the concept without a lot of critical thinking, and help make teachings more accessible via stories. This also helps explain why middlemen came into being between God and commoners. By instituting prayers of praise and petition – humans can easily think of God as a very powerful human who is more powerful than a King, rather than as an abstract concept. And as they get to think over time, they can fine tune their belief and faith to whatever suits them. So I think it was a very smart idea to put such a framework in place.

Concept of life after death is also a very clever and smart idea in my opinion. Since no one knows exactly what happens after death – the thought that you could be praised/punished will keep us even more focused on sticking to the framework when we are alive. This serves as a catch-all for anything that happens which cannot be explained easily. For example – say you followed all the teachings of your religion, and still got in to trouble some how. This can then be explained that this is “a test” and “your reward will be in your next life”. The next life of course differs across religions – some saying you will be born again to suffer consequences of past life, and some say you go to hell/heaven after God tallies your score and so on. Risk averse nature of many people make them feel more secure that if they stick to the rules – they have a good chance of going to heaven, in case there is a heaven. In case there is no heaven, it still gives them a reason to feel more peaceful in life and stay out of trouble. So it works either way.