Mastering the Art of Project Management: Strategies for Seamless Execution

A small events company wins its biggest contract yet: a three-day conference for 400 delegates. Excited and keen to impress, the team starts immediately. They book the venue in the first week, commission branded materials in the second and begin selling sponsorship in the third. Only later do they discover that the client’s expected numbers have changed, the venue’s catering can’t handle dietary requirements at that scale, and half the printed materials carry an outdated programme.

The next six weeks are spent firefighting. The conference happens, but late nights, rushed reprints and a stressed client turn a career-making project into a cautionary tale.

It’s a familiar pattern, and it isn’t only a small-business problem. Research on thousands of projects of every size suggests that most go wrong because people rush the planning, then spend far longer delivering than they should.

One Like insight: Planning is cheap and changes are easy on paper. Doing is expensive and changes are costly in the real world. Spend your time where mistakes cost least.

Think slow, act fast

Bent Flyvbjerg, a professor at the University of Oxford, has spent decades building one of the world’s largest databases of projects: more than 16,000 of them, across over 20 fields and more than 100 countries, from IT systems and buildings to film productions and events. In the 2023 book How Big Things Get Done, written with journalist Dan Gardner, he summarised what the data shows.

The headline figures are sobering. Only 8.5% of projects are completed on both budget and time. Just 0.5%, one in two hundred, are completed on budget, on time and with the benefits that were promised.

Flyvbjerg found that failing projects tend to follow a pattern he called “think fast, act slow”: they rush through planning, commit early, then spend years in a slow and troubled delivery phase, where every problem is expensive to fix and every delay exposes the project to new risks. Successful projects tend to do the opposite: “think slow, act fast”. They spend time testing ideas, challenging assumptions and refining the plan while changes are still cheap, then deliver quickly and decisively.

His favourite example is the animation studio Pixar, which spends years developing and testing a film’s story through rough sketches and storyboards, where changes cost almost nothing, before committing to the expensive work of full animation.

The database focuses mainly on large projects, and small businesses rarely run megaprojects. But the logic applies at every scale: the cheapest place to fix a problem is on paper.

Strategies for seamless execution

Flyvbjerg and Gardner distil their findings into a set of practical rules of thumb. Several translate directly to small-business projects, from launching a product to fitting out a new shop or running an event.

Start with the end in mind. Flyvbjerg calls this “thinking from right to left”: begin with the result you want and why it matters, then work backwards to the steps. For the events company, that means first defining what a successful conference looks like for the client, then planning everything else around it.

Take the outside view. Instead of estimating from your own optimistic plan, ask how long and how much similar projects actually took. As we explored in Why Everything Takes Longer Than You Planned, our own estimates are reliably too rosy.

Test cheaply before committing. Sketch it, mock it up, pilot it, run a small version. Find the problems while changing course costs an email rather than a reprint.

Find your “Lego”. Break big projects into small, repeatable building blocks that can be tested and improved: a standard event checklist, a template proposal, a module you can reuse. Repetition makes delivery faster and more reliable.

Get the right people involved early. Experienced people, whether a seasoned colleague, a trusted supplier or an expert adviser, spot problems in planning that newcomers miss.

Then act fast and decisively. Once the plan is solid, commit and deliver quickly, limiting scope changes. A long delivery phase gives more time for things to go wrong.

Putting it into practice

Before your next significant project starts, set aside proper planning time, even if everyone is eager to begin. Write down the result you want and how you’ll know you’ve achieved it. Look at how long similar projects really took. List the three biggest risks and how you’d test each one cheaply. Only then commit to suppliers, dates and spending, and once you do, move quickly and resist adding new scope halfway through.

Keep the project visible and owned, too. As we explored in Everyone’s Job Is Nobody’s Job and Nine Projects, All Sixty Per Cent Done, clear ownership and fewer projects at once make delivery smoother.

A few questions can help:

• What exactly does success look like, and how will we measure it?
• How long did similar projects actually take, here or elsewhere?
• What’s the cheapest way to test our biggest assumptions before we commit?
• Once we start delivering, how will we protect the project from scope creep?

Which brings us back to the events company and its biggest contract. The team’s enthusiasm was an asset, but it pushed them into the expensive phase too early. Two extra weeks of planning, confirming numbers with the client, testing the venue’s catering and finalising the programme before printing, would have cost almost nothing. Instead, they spent six weeks paying for problems they could have found on paper.

Sources

1. Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner, How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between (Currency, 2023). Figures as summarised by the publisher, Pan Macmillan.