A Smarter Way to Prevent Project Delays — Lessons for Georgia

The article “A Better Way to Avoid Project Delays” (MIT Sloan Management Review, 2025) shows that most project failures stem not from poor management but from unrealistic scheduling. Nearly half of global projects are completed late, and about one-third never reach completion at all. The biggest problem, the authors argue, is not incompetence but misplaced optimism — when executives and project sponsors consistently underestimate the time and resources required.

The delays that plagued the Berlin Brandenburg Airport, which took 14 years instead of five to complete, or the U.S. “Nukegate” nuclear project, which collapsed entirely, demonstrate that lateness is rarely a technical issue. It is primarily psychological. The authors describe this as “cognitive anchoring” — the tendency of teams to fixate on an initial optimistic estimate that distorts all subsequent decisions. When a leader says, “We’ll finish this in two months,” even if that is impossible, team members subconsciously adjust their expectations to that target. What follows is a cascade of overly hopeful assumptions that push the project toward inevitable delay.

The researchers propose an alternative — the use of “helpful anchors”, where estimates are grounded not in guesswork but in real data from past projects. When companies rely on reference class forecasting — forecasting based on average completion times from similar past projects — their accuracy improves dramatically. This method reduces overconfidence and introduces a form of empirical discipline into planning.

Yet precision in scheduling alone does not guarantee success. When organizations reward teams solely for “meeting deadlines,” managers often play it safe — extending tasks artificially to ensure they finish on time. This distorts performance measurement. A more effective approach, the authors suggest, is to reward both speed and accuracy, recognizing teams that deliver on realistic forecasts while maintaining quality.

For Georgia, these lessons are especially relevant. Many national and municipal projects — from road construction to digital reforms — face chronic delays. They are often blamed on external disruptions, but the root cause lies in planning culture, where deadlines are set politically or optimistically, not empirically.

A shift toward data-driven planning could make a significant difference. Georgian institutions and companies should begin by building databases of past projects — documenting timelines, costs, and management patterns. This would allow future teams to base their schedules on real averages rather than intuition. Another crucial step is expectation management: project sponsors, ministries, or investors must be shown historical evidence before committing to unrealistic deadlines. Finally, organizations should implement innovative incentive systems that reward teams not only for on-time delivery but for the accuracy of their forecasts and the value they generate.

Education also plays a vital role. Universities — such as the Business and Technology University — can integrate data-based project planning and performance evaluation into their curricula, helping future managers understand that execution success begins with realistic design.

As both the MIT Sloan Management Review article “A Better Way to Avoid Project Delays” and BTUAI’s research experience indicate, the true measure of a project’s success lies not in how fast it is completed, but in how accurately it is planned. In Georgia, where time and resources are limited and expectations often politically charged, grounding decisions in historical data and disciplined forecasting could transform project management — making development faster, more transparent, and more sustainable.