Interesting. One think I would like to see more of mentioned here—but perhaps will have to dig for myself—would be about the structure of the project management. It seems one clear characteristic is complexity of the whole. While cost, and overall “size”, would clearly be well correlated. However I don’t think that is the critical feature. I would perhaps pose it as a separability issue. Can the overall whole be chunked out into bite-sized bits without too much coordination type work or not?
As more of a side thought, I wonder if anyone has done much in the way of spill-over type effects on these mega projects and if any categorization or characteristics are identifiable. We know there have been spillover from both the space program and military programs. Not sure about more commercial or government mega projects. But you would think all infrastructure type projects should benefit from some positive network externality effects.
I don’t try to make any “if you built it they will come” argument here. If any it would be a “people are pretty good at figuring out how to make lemonaide from a lemon” type “argument”. This kind of goes along with the too complex to manage well cases as well. We often will not know what the end benefits will be for many things—if the USA didn’t do the electrification project to get power to rural communities would we have the same type of communications networks we currently have? Worse? Better???
Of course this is not really about how to better manage such projects and it’s likely better managements would allow such aspects greater potentials and lessen any such affects.
I would perhaps pose it as a separability issue. Can the overall whole be chunked out into bite-sized bits without too much coordination type work or not?
My understanding is no, it cannot. What you describe is the basic approach to project management, and the failure of that approach motivates the field. I can think of two specific reasons why:
The first is scale, and I think an intuition similar to Dissolving the Fermi Paradox applies: the question is not the likelihood of each part failing, but rather the likelihood of at least one bottleneck part failing. As the project grows large enough, we should expect to be perpetually choking on one bottleneck or other.
The second is magnitude, which is really the focus of the above paper. Once projects reach a large enough absolute size, more and different stakeholders enter the picture. Each new stakeholder is a stupendous increase in the political complexity of the project, so much so that even at the smaller level of projects where we know the right answers about how to do them applying the right answers is often impossible because of the different interests at play. This is why there is so much effort in keeping the number of stakeholders as small as possible in decision making.
But you would think all infrastructure type projects should benefit from some positive network externality effects.
This is a component of the economic sublime, as I understand it. One example of the kind of stakeholder who enters the picture would be a restaurant owner a block away from the construction site, who expects to benefit from the redirected foot traffic due to construction, or the business of the construction workers, or the increased foot traffic after the project is completed, or all of the above.
As the project grows large enough, we should expect to be perpetually choking on one bottleneck or other.
I did understand that but was suggesting that the criteria as a mega project was really not about the costs—though fully expect a high costs to be associated with such effort. As you say, they cannot be easily be separated into more manageable sub-projects. Perhaps I can rephrase my though. Is the position that any and every project that costs $X or more necessarily has the type of complexity and non-separability?
If not then the ability to classify high cost projects should be useful—and point to alternative management requirements if all projects greater than $x still suffer from many of the same inefficiencies.
Each new stakeholder is a stupendous increase in the political complexity of the project, so much so that even at the smaller level of projects where we know the right answers about how to do them applying the right answers is often impossible because of the different interests at play.
Sure, and you run into whole problem of what exactly is the right answer as the different stakeholder are maximizing slightly different (and likely equally legitimate) criteria. That alone is not a bad or wrong thing. But the approach of limiting participation, in a way, seems exactly the same thing as chunking the project into manageable bites. But it’s not clear that can be done much better than disassembling the project into smaller, simpler and more manageable sub projects.
If so, limiting the stakeholders then the assessment of the project will always be one of partial failure. That would also drive various type of cost over run and time delays when such excluded stakeholders seek to influence the project from outside the management process.
It’s not clear to me that would be the optimal solution to all mega projects.
Is the position that any and every project that costs $X or more necessarily has the type of complexity and non-separability?
is a reasonable approximation of Flyvbjerg’s position. As you say, it is not really about costs per se; the cost is a heuristic for things that drive complexity and non-separability, while also being the primary metric for success.
Interesting. One think I would like to see more of mentioned here—but perhaps will have to dig for myself—would be about the structure of the project management. It seems one clear characteristic is complexity of the whole. While cost, and overall “size”, would clearly be well correlated. However I don’t think that is the critical feature. I would perhaps pose it as a separability issue. Can the overall whole be chunked out into bite-sized bits without too much coordination type work or not?
As more of a side thought, I wonder if anyone has done much in the way of spill-over type effects on these mega projects and if any categorization or characteristics are identifiable. We know there have been spillover from both the space program and military programs. Not sure about more commercial or government mega projects. But you would think all infrastructure type projects should benefit from some positive network externality effects.
I don’t try to make any “if you built it they will come” argument here. If any it would be a “people are pretty good at figuring out how to make lemonaide from a lemon” type “argument”. This kind of goes along with the too complex to manage well cases as well. We often will not know what the end benefits will be for many things—if the USA didn’t do the electrification project to get power to rural communities would we have the same type of communications networks we currently have? Worse? Better???
Of course this is not really about how to better manage such projects and it’s likely better managements would allow such aspects greater potentials and lessen any such affects.
My understanding is no, it cannot. What you describe is the basic approach to project management, and the failure of that approach motivates the field. I can think of two specific reasons why:
The first is scale, and I think an intuition similar to Dissolving the Fermi Paradox applies: the question is not the likelihood of each part failing, but rather the likelihood of at least one bottleneck part failing. As the project grows large enough, we should expect to be perpetually choking on one bottleneck or other.
The second is magnitude, which is really the focus of the above paper. Once projects reach a large enough absolute size, more and different stakeholders enter the picture. Each new stakeholder is a stupendous increase in the political complexity of the project, so much so that even at the smaller level of projects where we know the right answers about how to do them applying the right answers is often impossible because of the different interests at play. This is why there is so much effort in keeping the number of stakeholders as small as possible in decision making.
This is a component of the economic sublime, as I understand it. One example of the kind of stakeholder who enters the picture would be a restaurant owner a block away from the construction site, who expects to benefit from the redirected foot traffic due to construction, or the business of the construction workers, or the increased foot traffic after the project is completed, or all of the above.
I did understand that but was suggesting that the criteria as a mega project was really not about the costs—though fully expect a high costs to be associated with such effort. As you say, they cannot be easily be separated into more manageable sub-projects. Perhaps I can rephrase my though. Is the position that any and every project that costs $X or more necessarily has the type of complexity and non-separability?
If not then the ability to classify high cost projects should be useful—and point to alternative management requirements if all projects greater than $x still suffer from many of the same inefficiencies.
Sure, and you run into whole problem of what exactly is the right answer as the different stakeholder are maximizing slightly different (and likely equally legitimate) criteria. That alone is not a bad or wrong thing. But the approach of limiting participation, in a way, seems exactly the same thing as chunking the project into manageable bites. But it’s not clear that can be done much better than disassembling the project into smaller, simpler and more manageable sub projects.
If so, limiting the stakeholders then the assessment of the project will always be one of partial failure. That would also drive various type of cost over run and time delays when such excluded stakeholders seek to influence the project from outside the management process.
It’s not clear to me that would be the optimal solution to all mega projects.
I think this:
is a reasonable approximation of Flyvbjerg’s position. As you say, it is not really about costs per se; the cost is a heuristic for things that drive complexity and non-separability, while also being the primary metric for success.