If noticed, it’s more likely to be forgotten unless carefully documented. In other words, the technical debt most likely to be generated is that which is the most benign in the short term, and which is therefore more likely to escape notice. It’s therefore more likely to survive in the intermediate or long term. Awkward architecture might be more difficult to identify. Debt that creates trouble in the current effort is more likely to be retired in the short term, if not in the current effort. For example, technical debt that might make a particular enhancement more difficult in the next project is more likely to appear than technical debt that creates trouble in the current effort. And this mechanism, or any mechanism associated with schedule or budget pressure, tends to produce technical debt that’s subtle-it’s the type least likely to become evident in the short term. In turn, they both contribute to conditions favorable for creating nonstrategic technical debt. Photo (cc) Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz), courtesy Wikimedia Commons.Unrealistic optimism creates budget shortfalls and schedule pressures. It also affects risk projections, including deaths. There’s little doubt that unrealistic optimism affects more than budget and schedule projections. 42 more died of a condition diagnosed as pneumonia, but which experts now believe to have been carbon monoxide poisoning due to poor ventilation in the dam’s diversion tunnels during construction. 112 men died in incidents associated with its construction. Apparently the planning fallacy doesn’t act inevitably. A special property of pressure-induced debt Hoover Dam, aerial view, September 2017. Under construction from 1931 to 1936, the cost of the dam was $48.8M ($639M in 2016 dollars) under a fixed-price contract.

Rather, it’s a variant of the N-Person Prisoner’s Dilemma. call this mechanism the “Conspiracy of Optimism,” possibly facetiously, it isn’t actually a conspiracy. This competition compels them to be unrealistically optimistic about their objectives, costs, and schedules. They observe that because organizational resources are finite, project champions compete with each other for resources. describe a dynamic that exacerbates the problem. Enter the n-person prisoner’s dilemmaīoehm et al. So there’s a tendency to promise lower costs, faster delivery, and greater benefits than anyone can reasonably expect. Failing to harvest lessons from the distributional evidence, which is inherently more diverse than singular evidence, the planners tend to underestimate cost and schedule. They do this even when the singular evidence is scanty or questionable.

The planning fallacy is planners’ tendency to pay too little attention to distributional evidence and too much to singular evidence. Distributional evidence is specific to similar past efforts. Singular evidence is specific to the case at hand. They discuss two types of evidence planners use. In a 1977 report, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky identify one particular cognitive bias, the planning fallacy, which afflicts planners. Last updated on July 8th, 2021 at 01:31 pm

Unrealistic optimism persuasion