0.5% of projects deliver to budget, on time, and with the benefits they were supposed to.
Not my statistic, but from Alexander Budzier of Oxford Saïd Business School. It came from a study of more than 22,000 projects across sectors, showing 50% deliver on budget, 8% on budget and on time, and that 0.5% hitting budget, time, and benefits.
The interesting question is why. One of the indicators of being in that 0.5% is that those projects spend an awful lot more in planning than you’d see in other projects. You will have seen it yourself – the push is to get started, with the barebones of the route in hand, filling the rest in as you go. Maybe 3-5% of the total cost spent on planning.
The ones that hit schedule, budget, benefits? 20 – 30% of the cost. Time, effort, money spent on getting the plan, detailed and ready to go, in place before you start.
The podcast is worth a watch/listen, lots of thought provoking stuff in there.
My own take? Well, if I was a cynic (which obviously I am not) I’d wonder if the planning time is really a cause of the future success, or success is correlated – do organisations that are willing to spend that much on planning up front also have a more mature and well structured way of handling projects? Are their quality filters for what actually gets to be a project more robust?
Trevor Roberts is a programme and project management consultant and the founder of Dull Industries – a consultancy focused on project turnaround, AI implementation, and digital strategy.