Recommendations for the management of projects place emphasis on planning and tracking. Planning the schedule of work, the expectations for performance it establishes, and the tracking of actual work performance to that plan represents project management’s (PM’s) “control paradigm.” The control paradigm might represent a vulnerability in normative PM. Uncertainty about scope, variance, and exogenous risks affect the predictive accuracy of any plan. The consequences of plan uncertainty negatively influenced contractors’ reporting, particularly post-contract when there might be contractual and political drivers to present false certainty and progress on the project is a common (optimism) bias in PM. This means that a plan, and the intention to “track” progress, may be insufficient to create the monitoring required for a project. Moreover, the viability of deterministic planning, in which a plan is created in detail, anticipates variance, and then provides an accurate representation of the work to be done, is contested. This study employed the “Critical Incident Technique” (CIT), and it was used to analyse planning problems affecting n = 4 project cases. This analysis was used to develop a response to recover the issues of poor project performance. The response involved an approach to planning and modelling of the project that allowed proactive mitigation of dependency risks and better coordination across client and contracting partners. The research team referred to the response as “independent planning” because the key to that planning solution was the removal of partisan interest from the planning (option modelling and re-planning) activities. The study’s researchers found temporary success in improving the management of the project arising from plan modelling. Freed up from the constraints of “proving” progress, this allowed the modelling of probabilities and possibilities) and this prompted proactive mitigation of dependency risk, and better coordination across tasks, resulting in less conflict around scope changes and claims for additional work. Once the researchers left the case projects, the quick return to more reactive, less planning coordination, and less transparency of reporting, indicates that behavioural drivers and cultural norms need to also be addressed if plan modelling is to realise its potential utility for practice.