Behavioral PM: The Impact of Environment on Decision Making, Team Dynamics and Project Success

Efforts to achieve the triple constraint of successful project management—staying within budget, on schedule, and delivering expected benefits—is as challenging as ever. Despite improvements in methodologies, techniques, and tools over the past several decades, little progress has been made in achieving improved project outcomes and results. This paper identifies key factors contributing to project failures, noting that many of these failures and their root causes go unnoticed and unaddressed, primarily due to behavioral, cognitive, and often invisible human factors. It then examines five project failures through this lens, offering insights and proposing behavioral interventions to enhance project performance, while also identifying areas for future exploration.