Project planning or die

I was talking with a friend recently, he’s an IT project manager for a major oil company, he was telling me about the failure rate of poorly planned projects. I could relate to this so well, most of my projects that aren’t planned properly fail to meet mine or the clients expectations. It’s often the client who is trying reduce the planning phase; but i would bet that in most cases a strong planning/design phase reduces costs down the line. Problems or mistakes that aren’t identified early on are magnified and are more difficult to solve in a construction phase.
My friend was saying that 99% of the time a project would still be pushed ahead because it was in the construction phase although there was a huge hurdle that, perhaps identified earlier, the business case for the project would be quite different!
When i meet a new client or team, the first thing people want to start talking about is outcome rather than the problem or question. I think that the outcome depends on the correct answers to the problem.
I try very hard not to talk about the way something will look or work until we’ve identified the problem, only then can we start to plan and design based on the information/users we’ve identified.
I think i need another meeting with my friend…