Business Cases, Benefits and Potential Value : The impact of Planning Fallacy, Optimism Bias and Strategic Misrepresentation on the Road to Success

Abstract

Recent articles in this column focused on the preference for planning over plans, the wider need to consider the inevitable role of uncertainty in change programmes, the social element of projects, and the increasing necessity for flexibility, resilience and agility, in preference to strict organization and control. They also addressed a need to rethink how projects are initiated and managed. In general, projects now encompass extended life cycles and time horizons, which require managers and stakeholders to engage with and address wider time horizons, realised benefits, decommissioning, long terms environmental impacts, societal considerations, accrued value and changing and evolving uses. The shift implies that projects are mutating from temporal operational undertakings into more influential strategic endeavours. Such a shift places an even greater importance on the writing of comprehensive and well-reasoned business cases that can be used to underpin proposed undertakings.