I have no experience of this other than in the IT world but I wonder if it's applicable here:
Often a project that I was involved in would never have been contemplated for a second if the true cost in time and money had been known at the start. People who understood knew that without the effort the company would have had nothing more than short term strategy and would eventually face some completely unexpected challenge of a magnitude that it could not respond to for lack of preparation.
So knowing the management's low appetite for any kind of risk and general lack of understanding of the situation that faced them, one would either skimp and scrape on the plan and thus get permission to commence or put in a realistic estimate and be shot down.
It was also always important to appear to have a working product quickly even if it didn't work properly because otherwise cancellation also loomed. Again this was part of the way managers are under great pressure to appear to achieve things and that their bosses don't know the difference between appearance and fact and don't want to know because they are trying to look good to someone themselves.
The company in which I had most of this experience no longer exists of course, because it was put to the sword by smarter foreign rivals.
Last edited by t43562; 5th Aug 2013 at 10:46.