Essay On Planning Fallacy

1- Introduction

This paper presents an overview of some cognitive biases studied in the Computational Thinking module and how an awareness and application of these cognitive bias frameworks may have helped our group to work better as a team throughout the Major project.

2- The Planning Fallacy

The planning fallacy, which is one of the fundamental biases related to estimations in project management, was first proposed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1979. It is a judgement bias in which people underestimate task-completion times as it displays an optimism bias. The fallacy says that people systematically underestimate how long it will take to do a task, and are over confident in their own estimates.

In the case of our DSA project, The Vegging Out mobile app, and being students with a lack of experience in Agile Project Management, we found it difficult to make time estimates at all the

This particular cognitive bias causes people to reason that, when they have put a certain amount of money, effort, or time into a certain project or situation, and they have realised, or been advised that the project will not come to fruition, or that that avenue of effort will not lead anywhere, the person will choose to continue down that avenue and complete the project, even if it involves spending more money, as to abandon it would mean having wasted the original expenditure, ‘sending good money after bad’, so to speak. An example is the businessman who has paid a consultant €1000 to explore the pros and cons of starting a new business division. The consultant advises him not to pursue that avenue, as it is a declining market. The businessman chooses to move forward with the new division, even though it is a decision, as otherwise he will have wasted the €1000. This fallacy is caused by thinking short-term instead of