The Role Of “I” And “We” In Project Time Estimation

The last decade has seen a growing interest in the ways planners faithfully or unfaithfully overestimate benefits and underestimates costs and times, when they estimate the outcomes of projects. It does, however, remain unclear how a group of planners could make mistakes in their estimations “collectively” since their decisions bear consequences on and for others in a social interactive context. Taking this criticism as a starting point, the convergences and divergences, conflicts and connections between individual and group estimations is investigated by means of philosophy of collective intentionality (Tuomela, 2005). Our ongoing experiments are designed, first, to explore the reasons behind the misestimations of time, and, second, to uncover the tension between individual intentions vs. group intentions. The research findings signify the importance of the collective over the individualistic approach on studying the inaccuracies of project time.