Sun Zi said: Before any battle, if an analysis to check the chances of success reveals a high chance of winning, it usually turns out to be true.

孫子曰：夫未戰而廟算勝者，得算多也﹔未戰而廟算不勝者，得算少也。

Sun Zi said:

Before any battle, if an analysis to check the chances of success reveals a high chance of winning, it usually turns out to be true. If the analysis reveals a low chance of winning, there will be only slim chance of success in the actual battle.

Parallel to Project Management
Sun Zi’s Art of War advocates that one should not rush into battle without carefully analyzing the situation and checking the likelihood of winning first. Similarly in Project Management, one should not rush to work on a project without first going through some detailed analysis work to check the feasibility of the project.

At least two types of feasibility analysis should be conducted prior to starting work on the project. The first type is a study of the economic feasibility of the project. The next type of feasibility analysis should be to check on the technical feasibility of the project.

Assuming that after careful analysis we conclude that the project is still feasible and desirable, we also need to perform a high level analysis of some of the key risks that could jeopardise the feasibility of the project.

If after all these feasibility studies and risk analysis, we found that either the project is not feasible economically or technically, or it could entail too much risk that there is a slim chance of project success, then we should stop proceeding with the project.

As the Art of War mentions, if an analysis to check the chance of success reveals a low chance of winning, there will be only slim chance of success in the actual project. So why waste everyone’s time and resources?