The Liar's Club: Concealing Rework in Concurrent Development

Successfully implementing concurrent development has proven difficult for many organizations. However, many theories addressing concurrent development treat either technical aspects of the development process (e.g., precedence relationships) or behavioral issues (e.g., creating effective cross-functional teams), but not their linkages. We argue that much of the complexity of concurrent development—and the implementation failures that plague many organizations—arises from interactions between the technical and behavioral dimensions. We use a dynamic project model that explicitly represents these interactions to investigate how a “Liar's Club”—concealing known rework requirements from managers and colleagues—can aggravate the “90% syndrome,” a common form of schedule failure, and disproportionately degrade schedule performance and project quality. We discuss the role of the incentives on and behavior of engineers and managers in concurrent development failure and explore policies to improve project performance.