Many projects fail to achieve their expected goals, partly because their goals were unrealistic to start with. The objective of this chapter is to enhance knowledge of the reasons why managers set unrealistic project goals. First, we identify key biases in the project management literature that might motivate a manager to set unrealistic project goals. We then analyze seven case studies of well-known project failures to determine which of these biases contributed the most to unrealistic goal setting. Our findings indicate that of these biases, two cognitive biases (optimism bias and overconfidence bias), the planning fallacy and escalation of commitment had the highest impact on these projects. We conclude by proposing ten practical recommendations managers can use to set more realistic project goals in future. These recommendations cover the following key areas: Effective goal setting, effective goal appraisal and effective project appraisal.

Over the last decade there have been significant advances in our understanding of how delivery models enable megaproject innovation. Despite this, megaprojects often misbehave and struggle to take advantage of opportunities to innovate because control and leadership practices crowd it out. In this chapter we return to Albert Hirschman and his Voyage of Discovery principle and Latitude concept of project governance. Hirschman was a major proponent of innovation and observed the importance of a spirit of enterprise during the execution of large development projects. However, he did not elaborate on how the capacity to innovate might be mobilized in specific project contexts. This chapter extends these ideas by examining the literature on megaproject capabilities and the delivery model architectures that enable innovation during megaproject execution. We then examine the literature on the complementary roles that megaproject control and leadership can play in balancing and driving innovative responses to complexity and uncertainty. We conclude that there is a need for further research in this area.

The project front-end has long been understood as a project phase critical to overall project success. In this chapter, we investigate the underexplored topic of (mis-)behaviour in the project front-end. Drawing upon literature on contractual and relational governance mechanisms, we argue that traditional forms of project governance do not have strong applicability to help address some of the most important challenges facing the front-end of projects. This chapter commences by considering how misbehaviours can manifest and be present at different levels of analysis (macro, meso, micro). We then briefly review extant governance studies before considering how misbehaviours can be tackled through such (contractual and relational) governance mechanisms. We conclude our chapter by presenting a future research agenda to help further address the important and under-researched topic of project front-end misbehaviour.

Uncertainty in projects and their context causes various needs for changes to projects and, consequently, to the entire project portfolio. While organizations attempt to build their project portfolios in alignment with strategy, such uncertainties may require constant uncertainty monitoring and repeated strategic realignment, so that the project portfolio would serve the strategic interests of the organization over time. This chapter characterizes the pursuit of strategic alignment in project portfolio management, maps the various sources of uncertainty that may jeopardize this alignment, and reports how organizations manage uncertainties that have accumulated to a full-blown chaos, through actions of realignment. We use examples and findings from five firms’ project portfolio management, to illustrate uncertainty sources and strategic realignment. The findings show that project behavior is both a source of uncertainty and a potential mechanism for activating and promoting strategic realignment.

Projects tend to have a complicated life (or “behavior”) of their own with plenty of out-turns, going off track, and, in the end, targets set may be realized anywhere but on target, from near misses to near hits. Therefore, the project behavior phenomenon abounds in project management theory and practice. However, while scholars see the need to understand project challenges within the context of project behavior, they fail to follow the trail to its defining principles. Against this backdrop, this handbook focuses on the observance of the project behavior phenomenon in which there are systematic deviations between project initiation and execution. This introductory chapter explains what project behavior is and why it matters for project management scholars and practitioners alike. It reviews the key principles of project behavior and how they each connect to project complexity, risk, uncertainty, and performance, from both a scholarly and practical standpoint. It provides not only a historical context for the different theories of project behavior but a typology. As well, it offers a summary of the chapters in the handbook and discusses how they advance project behavior theory and practice.

Effective stakeholder management is seen as a critical element of project management, and yet, despite the growing body of literature projects still experience stakeholder challenges. Why is this the case? In seeking to answer this question, this chapter commences with an exploration of three key questions – a) who the project stakeholders are, b) how to effectively manage them within the contest of their social networks, and c) when to manage them. Based on the exploration, the chapter then considers complexities associated with stakeholder management processes (that is the socio-political considerations), content (the myriad views on interconnected and potentially competing values and issues) and the inherent dynamic nature of the stakeholder landscape (reflecting relationships, churn, and norms). The chapter concludes by reflecting on four emergent and interconnected paradoxes using the three complexity lenses to provide recommendations for management.

This chapter presents a longitudinal process study of an information systems project and suggests that a hierarchy of sub-projects that belong to the same overall project may trigger unfavorable project behavior. Our findings indicate that project managers run the risk of “balancing” divergent evaluations of sub-projects via an averaging rule, which in turn leads to an overestimation of the overall project performance and consequently negatively impacting project behavior. Based on our case-study findings, we develop a process model explaining the dynamic relationship between hierarchical project structures, managerial decisions, and project behavior. Interestingly, this research shows how hierarchical project structures may hinder rather than support complex task execution, a finding that could help explain the erroneous decision making often observed in troubled projects.

The ‘Hiding Hand’ is a metaphor which Albert Hirschman used, to characterise the international development process. It states that international development projects typically incur major cost overruns and other implementation problems, which put in question the decision to launch them in the first place. Indeed, had these difficulties been known in advance, the projects might never have been even tried. Nevertheless, human ingenuity often finds a way around these difficulties and can indeed discover unforeseen benefits, which may then justify the project after all.

This has come in for strong criticism, by writers such as Flyvbjerg, based on his own analysis of projects, their costs and their effects. Flyvbjerg however has ‘tested’ the Hiding Hand at only a very limited micro level of the individual project. He misses Hirschman’s account of the larger environment within which international development projects and the Hiding Hand operate.

Part 3 addresses that macro-context, as viewed by Hirschman; from there it then turns back to the individual project and its evaluation. Part 4 situates the Hiding Hand in relation to larger debates on economic and political development. Part 5 considers the responsibility of social scientists, to hold development actors and the political community to account.

Many projects experience cost overruns and fail to meet the expectations of users and funding parties. Numerous studies have documented projects that have failed, but there is less advice on what can be done to improve their performance. This chapter builds on research carried out by the Concept Research Programme in Norway, which for more than 20 years has been tasked by the Ministry of Finance to research large government projects. The authors offer advice on how project owners can increase the likelihood of project success. The advice includes the importance of a project governance regime, external review of estimates, and well-aligned incentives. The authors argue that the institutional context through which projects are delivered may have consequences for the ability of individuals and organisations to knowingly or unconsciously bias estimates. They also recommend follow-up activities after project completion, such as active ownership to realise benefits and systematic ex-post evaluation to improve accountability and learning.

Project management essentially involves temporal work, in other words, the purposive effort to orient the temporal structures that guide action around given tasks. Yet, projects often involve participants or stakeholders holding different temporal orientations that may be more or less compatible with proposed temporal structures. In this paper we consider how different forms of temporal structuring influence project behavior (i.e., how participants engage with projects, and how projects play out to produce outcomes). Specifically, building on a review of the literature on projects and temporality, we explore how and why the socially constructed nature of project tasks (open-ended vs. closed-ended) interacts with efforts at temporal structuring (open vs. closed) to orient participants’ actions, with varying consequences for behaviors and outcomes. We conclude by proposing a series of future research directions aimed at better understanding the relations between temporal structuring and project behavior.

The Planning Fallacy principle, a prominent account of project behavior and particularly the causes of cost overruns and benefit shortfalls, stems from the belief that bias outweighs error. Its very popularity begs for an inquiry on its theoretical appeal and whether it remains a viable argument to explain cost overrun and benefit shortfall behavior. This chapter argues that the Planning Fallacy is in danger of danger of being debunked, suggesting that while its rise can be attributed to an impulsion to theorize, its subsequent fall may be due to a companion compulsion to theorize. The chapter focuses on three questions: Is the Planning Fallacy principle a theory anyway and, if yes, is the theory complete? Is the theory too narrow in scope or does it cater to complexity and uncertainty? Will it lose support from the scientific community? The chapter demonstrates that the fall may be due to the incomplete nature of the theory and its limited scope. The chapter contends that the popular appeal of the Planning Fallacy has vastly overstepped its ultimate viability and suggests that the Planning Fallacy principle is itself a form of Planning Fallacy as it overestimates its own theoretical power.