'Failing to plan is planning to fail': the old maxim and the perceptions of African international development project coordinators

摘要

"Failing to plan is planning to fail", as the old maxim says. Surprisingly a research by Dvir, Raz and Shenhar (2003) on the empirical relationship between project planning and project success, for R&D projects, produces intriguing results. Evidence seems to go against the popular belief about project planning and its relation to project success. If a minimum level of project planning is still a requirement, there is no correlation between the amount of effort invested in project planning and project success. Considering the benefit of project planning and the singularity of international development projects, this paper retests the results by the above-mentioned authors. Specifically, it examines the empirical relationship between project planning efforts, project success and project success criteria as perceived by African international development project coordinators. It aims to find out the extent to which those project coordinators make use of tools, techniques and methods that are available and to measure the strength of the relationship between this use of project management tools, techniques and methods in one hand; and project success and project success criteria in the other hand. The results, although in stark contrast to literature and to popular belief, corroborate the findings of the aforementioned authors. They suggest that project monitoring and evaluation tools are very often used in practice and they support the recurrent idea that the fundamental success criteria in the project managers' point of view remain time, cost, objectives and profile (visibility).