Many technical workers would rather do technical work than spend time planning. Many technical managers do not have sufficient training in technical management to feel confident that their planning will improve a project's outcome. Since neither party wants to do planning, it often doesn't get done.

But failure to plan is one of the most critical mistakes a project can make . . . effective planning is needed to resolve problems upstream [early in the project] at low cost, rather than downstream [late in the project] at high cost. The average project spends 80 percent of its time on rework—fixing mistakes that were made earlier in the project.