5.Findings
There was unanimity for susceptibility in eight of ten cognitive biases. Only a minority of project managers recognized susceptibility to pseudocertainty effect, which can be explained by the urgency inherent in IT project where there is a considerable focus on the development of what is most important, letting events that are unlikely to happen in background. Regarding to certainty effect, project managers did not present evidences on being susceptible to this bias since they did not refer to situations that could describe this systematic error in software projects.
Some of techniques mentioned to minimize the negative effects of cognitive biases were related to agile practices such as the use of burndown chart for daily monitoring of planned versus accomplished activities and bottom up planning from short activities which were suggested as alternatives to minimize planning fallacy effects. The last one was also indicated to minimize Parkinsonดs law effects along with daily team meetings.
Opinion of others was the alternative mentioned to reduce the majority of biases: anchoring, halo effect,availability related bias, pseudocertainty bias, planning fallacy, sunk cost fallacy and exposure effect. Although the project manager is responsible for making final project decisions, it shows a concern to consider opinion of others, such as consultants, Project Management Office members, other project managers and the project team itself with the objective of obtaining a better base for their decisions and not depositing all confidence in their own experience. The most mentioned root causes were related to comfort zone and absence of historical basis. The difficulty in storing information/data that is systematically organized and that can be retrieved easily is one of the most problems in knowledge management in projects context (Barclay and Osei Bryson, 2010;Pemsel and Wiewiora, 2013).