Planning Fallacy: A Case of Task Planning in IT Project Support Services

Sajiv Madhavan; Balasubramanian; Amalendu Jyotishi

Sajiv Madhavan Research Scholar, Amrita School of Business, Amrita University, Coimbatore, India
Balasubramanian Associate Professor, Amrita School of Business, Amrita University, Coimbatore, India
Amalendu Jyotishi Professor, Amrita School of Business, Amrita University, Bangalore, India

Keywords: Task Planning, Planning Fallacy

Abstract

Schedule and effort slippages are measures that practitioners in the Information Technology (IT) industry are all too familiar with. While we accept the fact that these slippages are realities of our day-to-day life, we put continual efforts to overcome or reduce the impact of these deviations. Our propensity to lose sense of
time-taken and become over optimistic and thereby skew our planning is termed as planning fallacy. This research is to study the planning errors, the reason for such behavior, its ubiquity in IT industry and how emedial actions may reduce planning errors. The intent is to approach the problem from a behavioral
economics point of view, on the irrational approach followed by individuals that lead to planning fallacy. The research methodology adopted was experimental design with random samples chosen as control and treatment group. The results of the study and experiments establish the g presence of planning fallacy in
many areas of task planning. Our results on the treatment group demonstrate that this judgment bias could be reduced to a large extent by periodic monitoring and facilitation.