Avoid Early Failure — 7 Planning Mistakes New PMs Make

About one in three project failures comes down to something almost boring: bad planning. Not drama, not villains—just quiet mistakes made in week one. A kickoff runs long, everyone nods, no one agrees on the same outcome… and months later, the project “mysteriously” falls apart.

PMI’s latest data says 11.4% of every project dollar simply vanishes through poor performance—and over a third of those failures trace back to choices made before anyone writes a single line of code or launches a single campaign. That’s both depressing and encouraging: depressing because the waste is huge, encouraging because it’s fixable.

In earlier episodes, you built a one-page charter and set up basic risk and communication habits. Now we zoom into the messy middle of planning—the part where new PMs quietly make seven avoidable mistakes that later look like “bad luck.”