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Think about it this way: how were the methods and tools you currently use in project management developed? Most of us don’t know. But what if we added to and improved those methods and tools by incorporating the science of human thinking? Wouldn’t that be more effective than just guessing what works best?
What is Behavioral Project Management?
Behavioral Project Management uses evidence-based research to design PM processes, metrics, interfaces, and skills around human cognition. There are two significant ways in which this is accomplished:
Design - designing PM methods and processes to account for how people think
Awareness - building awareness of thinking processes and errors helps PM practitioners correct them and improve project outcomes
Process Improvement Through Behavioral Design
Designing Processes
Designing processes and steps around the brain for more effective planning and delivery
Sometimes steps and processes can be improved by making small tweaks that are designed around the way humans process information and make decisions. BehavioralPM can help you design your project management processes to result in better planning reliability, reduced risk, increased safety in the field, and overall better decisions.
Removing Sludge
Taking out processes that slow down delivery and decrease reliable decision-making
There are often processes buried in our day-to-day work that reduce decision-making reliability and accuracy because of how our brains interact with activities and process information. BehavioralPM can help you uncover the sludge that’s impacting your effectiveness, efficiency, and decision-making.
Designing the Culture & Environment
Designing the organizational environment for better cognition and a culture that innovates and reduces risk
The organizational environment and culture are as responsible for clearer thinking as our own individual cognition. BehavioralPM can help facilitate improving your organization’s strategies to improve decision-making, reduce risk, and increase innovation capabilities.
Optimization Through Cognitive Awareness
Enhancing Cognition
Unfilter your thinking, giving your brain access to the intelligence that’s already there
Our brain has modes and filters (cognitive moderators) that can prevent us from taking in all the information that’s available. BehavioralPM can help you bring awareness about these filters of thought and give you strategies to enhance your intelligence with the capabilities your brain already possesses.
Reducing Thinking Errors
Empowering error reduction by bringing awareness of errors we have the power to resolve
Our brain has thinking errors (also called cognitive biases) that are the result of individual cognition, group, and organizational environmental factors. BehavioralPM can help bring awareness of these and show you how you can reverse and reduce some of these errors, and how improving the cognitive moderators is also linked to simultaneously empowering your brain toward error reduction.
Join us on the journey
The Science
BehavioralPM merges project management with the broader neuro and behavioral sciences, including:
Cognitive Science (includes cognitive biases)
Social Psychology
Behavioral Economics and Finance
Behavioral Design
Organizational Psychology
And more…
Meet the real practitioners of BehavioralPM - the women’s group from Brazil who are blazing a trail for this growing discipline
FAQ
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No. Behavioral Project Management (BPM) just helps these methods become more effective by adding a human-centered evidence-based foundation to existing methods. BPM doesn’t replace, it enhances.
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There’s a common misconception that most things that have to do with human behavior in business are just more leadership practices. Though BPM certainly does enhance leadership, it is far from its only focus. When we consider all the ways the brain interacts with project management, it is about a full range of sciences that study how people respond to stimuli (including in software), how they think in certain environments, how processes should be designed around their thinking, how they interact with other people, how they make decisions, and so much more. Leadership just becomes one very small aspect in the full consideration of human cognition.
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The word “behavioral” is very important. Human behavior is the output of thinking and feeling, thus the final outcome of judgment and decision. The word behavioral is chosen for some very specific reasons:
1 - It incorporates a whole host of sciences underneath it, such as cognitive psychology, social psychology, behavioral economics, and so many more
2 - Many other technical disciplines have adopted behavioral science as well, and all use the word behavioral in their names (these include Behavioral Economics, Behavioral Finance, Behavioral Marketing, and many more). So adding “Behavioral” to “Project Management” makes sense not only for transferability across the disciplines, but also because behavioral science itself encompasses all the sciences below it that are required.
Getting Familiar with BehavioralPM
University of Maryland article on the importance of Behavioral Project Management (click image)
A Podcast to explain it all from PM Point of View with Kendall Lott (click image)
Academic article: Errors, lies and misunderstandings: Systematic review on behavioural decision making in projects (click image)
Stats
Human Behavior & Thinking is Key
An estimated 70% of project performance relies on human factors
Project Failure is High
About half of all projects fail their schedule and cost objectives
Project Management is Changing
The project management discipline is showing signs of moving from purely technical aspects toward a more behavioral and social approach (Leybourne, 2007)
Designing Around Humans Gets Results
From decisions around risk, to building a reliable plan, designing project management around human cognition gets results. Some projects, for example, have seen increases in planning accuracy up to 80%
The World Runs on Projects
Around 21% of global gross domestic product every year (about $20 trillion in 2023) is capital formation, of which the majority is accomplished through projects. The more effective we are at running projects, the more we can accelerate human progress
- NeuralPlan NPPQ Certification in Behavioral Project Management and Planning
- NeuralPlan NPPQ Certification in Behavioral Project Management and Planning
Get NPPQ certified with the only evidence-based credential that combines cognitive and behavioral science with project management, planning, forecasting, and risk
BehavioralPM is designing project management around human cognition
BehavioralPM is not limited to skills development, but also includes designing interfaces such as software, revising metrics, and even developing processes to account for human behavior
Would you like to start implementing BehavioralPM in your organization? Click on the button below to visit our Services link