Rating: 8.0/10.
How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner
Book about project management: what are the differences between projects that are completed on time (like the Empire State Building), and those that experience years of delays and go significantly over budget, (like the California High-Speed Rail)? It is written by a professor of planning. Projects exceeding their timelines and budgets is very common; a common pattern is that the longer a project takes, the more likely it is to encounter additional delays. Therefore, it is advisable to spend more time in the planning stage, where delays are less consequential, if it can expedite the execution phase.
In many projects, there is pressure to start as soon as possible without much planning. This approach can be strategic, as once a project has commenced, it becomes politically challenging to stop it, but the results will be inferior. An example of this is the Sydney Opera House, which was initiated quickly by certain political stakeholders who wanted it to begin before they left office. Another example is the Pentagon, which was almost constructed in a poor location, but at the last minute, the flawed plan was rejected just before construction started.
Next is an example of a home renovation that exceeded its budget by a million dollars over several years because the scope kept increasing and more and more things were added. It’s best to avoid this by first asking why the project should be done and understanding the problem before jumping to specific solutions. The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao was originally intended to be a renovated warehouse until the architect, Gehry, asked what they were hoping to accomplish with the architecture and decided that the best plan was to construct an entirely new building, not renovate the existing one.
The Pixar process involves creating a low-fidelity version of the movie to test ideas cheaply before full production, and planning involves testing ideas like this in a sandbox environment without just sitting around and deliberating. The Sydney Opera House didn’t do this, and a lot of planning wasn’t complete when they started building, leading to numerous delays. It’s important to get someone with experience to lead the project or who has built similar projects before. If that’s difficult, at least structure the project so that the staff can learn as the project progresses. A counterexample of this is the Olympics, which are often poorly planned because each year it’s a new team in a new country that is doing it for the first time.
Some argue that you should just start the project and figure things out as you go, and there are certainly some success stories like this, but the author contends that these are the exceptions, and our failures are much more common. Due to survivorship bias, we often hear about the most famous projects that succeeded despite minimal planning. For large projects with high stakes, careful planning is essential. It is crucial to build a good team that shares the same goal. Treating team members well so that they work together to solve problems quickly, rather than blaming each other, enabled Terminal Five at Heathrow Airport to be completed on time.
The final advice is that when a task can be broken down into many smaller tasks, there is a much greater chance it will be completed on time. For example, building many schools or solar wind farms (which consist of units repeated thousands of times), tend to not go over budget by much, whereas projects that consist of “one big thing”, like a nuclear power plant, are much riskier and more likely to experience significant delays.
Overall, this book offers specific advice and examples from an expert in this area who has published numerous papers about the planning of large-scale projects. It is geared towards large, multi-year projects where failure has significant consequences; this is quite different from the type of planning done in tech startups, where the conventional advice is to do much less planning, figure things out as you go, and accept a high rate of failure. However, in cases where failure is highly undesirable, this book illustrates the processes of planning that enable the maximum chances of success for these types of megaprojects.
