I’m working on the Return on Investment of Project Management this week and I’ve come across a fascinating reference to how expectations can have a remarkable effect. Freek Vermeulen notes that just the expectation of better performance seems to be able to deliver it – up to 6% worth! That’s serious money when you’re talking about project management improvements. If we add this to the well-documented Hawthorne Effect which I’ve written about here before which can improve efficiency but about 1% just by measuring it, we’re talking about a potential 7% improvement in the performance of a new EPM system just by making sure the expectations are high and that we continually monitor the deployment.
Seven percent is a solution in itself.
