Opinions on planning, managing, and controlling programs, projects, or long-term contracts

Clarification preface: This work is a practitioner paper and does not aim to reinvent the mathematics of project control, but rather to draw attention to some phenomena that have often been encountered in real projects. Therefore, it is based on professional experience and offers practical insights to be discussed and further verified for practical application. The actual purpose of this paper is to discuss the offered set of practical observations derived from long-term project experience. Although the topics addressed may appear heterogeneous, they are linked by a common objective: improving planning and control decisions in order to reduce the systemic risk inherent in large and long-duration projects and contracts.