Time spent in planning is well invested
Too often, Project Managers (prompted by an eagerness to get to “the real work” and pressure from senior management or customers to “show some results”) put far too little effort into project planning. This chart, taken from one of our client organizations, demonstrates the problem with this approach. Notice that cost overruns decrease exponentially with time invested in planning to a limit (more about this soon).

Organizations seeking to improve their success at project management should evaluate the amount of effort they devote to planning as part of their end-of-project review (sometimes called a “post-mortem” or “lessons learned”). In general, effort and money spent on planning is more than recovered by avoiding the expenses of overruns.