Authors
Bent Flybjerg
- Oxford Saïd Business School
- Economic geographer
- Focus of practical decision making
- Main areas of focus: philodophy and methodology of the social sciences, pwoer and rationality in decision making, megaproject planning and management
Dan Gardner
- Investigative journalist
- Also wrote Superforecasting
Introduction
- Two universal drivers for project success and failure:
- psychology
- power
- Projects that fail tend to “think fast and act slow”, while successful projects tend to “think slow and act fast”
Chapter 1
- There is a blizzard of numbers in a project, and they are difficult to trust because it’s easy for people to cherry-pick or spin numbers to suit their argument
- “Iron Law of Megaprojects”: over budget, over time, under benefits
- Projects often have a “fat-tailed” distribution (as opposed to normal)
where the tails have extreme outcomes
- Costs aren’t just going over, but theres a non-trivial chance that they go disastrously wrong
- “fat-tailed” distributions are more likely to occur in complex systems
- Projects that fail tend to drag on because the window is open longer for black swan events
- dynamic inter-dependencies among the parts of the system created strong non-linear responses and amplification
- Focus on slow planning and fast action. Planning is a safe harbor, delivery is venturing across the storm-tossed seas
- Failure pattern:
- Planning is short, rush to break ground on the project, hit problems not covered in planning, enter a “break-fix cycle”, project drags on.
Chapter 2
-
“strategic misrepresentation”: distorting the timeline or costs for strategic purposes, e.g. to win a contract
“With contracts signed, the next step is to get shovels in the ground. Fast. “The idea is to get going,” concluded Willie Brown. “Start digging a hole and make it so big, there’s no alternative to coming up with the money to fill it in.”
Chapter 3
- Start with the why behind the project
- Good planning explores imagines, analyzes, tests, and iterates.
- Develop a clear understanding of what the goal is why
- At amazon they start with the press release and the FAQ document before starting the project
Chapter 4
- Tinker and iterate the way Pixar and Frank Gehry do
- Experi latin verb meaning “to try” “to test” or “to prove”
- root of the words experiment and experience
- A good plan apples experimentation or experience, a great plan applies both
- iteration frees people to experiment
- iteration allows scrutiny of all aspects of a plan
- “illusion of explanatory depth” - the fallacy that you truly understand complex phenoma more than you really do
- iteration forces you through the “illusion of explanatory depth” fallacy
- planning is cheap
- This is where the author squares his planning approach with
Scrum software practices. In a way, the push to get an MVP out
to get feedback is a way of planning and iteration.
- Author points out that this approach really only works for a subset of projects
- Where a Minimum Viable product is not acceptable, a maximum virtual product is useful (e.g 3-D rendering), build a realistic model
Chapter 5
- There is not a huge advantage to being first.
- phronesis - practical wisdom - comes from Aristotle
- First Mover vs. fast follower
- Using new technology is just as big a mistake as relying on novice
operators
- Technology is “frozen experience”, tried and tested tools are the result of iterations and lessons
- An experienced leader has “tacit knowledge” - experience that cannot easily be transferred (for example teaching someone to ride a bike)
Chapter 6
- Often a project is determined to be behind schedule because of delivery issues, but another question is was the schedule/estimation/forecast reasonable to begin with?
- Anchor and adjustment effect plays heavily into project forecasting. You need to pick the right anchor, to pick the right anchor use a reference class.
- uniqueness bias on our project. Our effort is so