How Big Things Get Done
About this book
Flyvbjerg spent decades assembling a database of large projects and their outcomes, and with Gardner turns that evidence into a short set of rules. The central finding is that big projects fail because planning is rushed and delivery is slow, when the reliable pattern is the reverse. The book explains reference class forecasting, which anchors an estimate to the record of comparable projects rather than to the plan in front of you, and makes the case for modular design as the way to build large things predictably. Examples run from the Sydney Opera House and nuclear plants to film production and kitchen renovations. Useful for anyone who has to defend a number for work that has never been done here before.
Description via Product Digest.
Topics
Related concepts
- Adaptive estimating and velocityRelative sizing, the delivery rate it produces, and how a range for a future date is forecast from what a team has actually done.
- Physical resource managementMaterial, equipment and facilities have lead times, storage costs and delivery windows that effort does not, and planning them as though they behaved like people is a reliable way to stall a project.
- Earned value managementPlanned value, earned value and actual cost, the variances and indices built from them, the forecasts that follow, and how to read each figure as a sentence.
- Estimating techniquesAnalogous, parametric, three point and bottom up estimates differ in what they cost to produce and what confidence they can honestly carry, which is what makes one of them right for a given decision.
- Integrated change controlWhy a change to a baseline is a decision, the path a change request takes from submission to a reissued baseline, who may approve one and how the same problem appears on adaptive work.
- Lessons learnedWhy lessons are captured continuously, the difference between a project register and an organisational repository, and what makes a lesson reusable.
- Project scope managementEstablishing what work is in the project and keeping it there, which turns on the difference between product scope and project scope and on whether each change passed through a decision.
- Schedule managementBuilding a model of how work unfolds in time from activities, dependencies and durations, then reading the critical path, the float and the price of every compression it offers.
- Sustainability in projectsThe environmental, social and economic obligations a project has to account for, how a constraint differs from an objective, and why they increasingly arrive through the contract.
- Project cost managementHow a project moves from an estimate to a cost baseline to a funding requirement, where contingency and management reserve sit relative to each, and what it means to control spend.
- The project business caseThe argument for why this project was funded ahead of the alternatives, including doing nothing, and the document that decides whether it should carry on being funded.
- Procurement and contractsMake or buy as an economic decision, the fixed price, cost reimbursable and time and materials families and who carries the risk under each, the procurement cycle, and why a contract type is a relationship.
- The external environmentEnterprise environmental factors and organisational process assets in plain terms, the routes by which market, regulatory, supply chain, geopolitical and economic change reach a project, and what to do about the things a project cannot control.