How Big Things Get Done

Author: Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner

The first thing I did before reading this book was to try and figure out how to pronounce Bent Flyvbjerg’s last name. After that I read his biography and was floored at what “Big” means for him. In a nutshell, he is the guy to call if you have a big project that is beyond anything that humankind has done before. 

It turns out that he is also a professor and has done extensive research on big projects and their metrics. It comes as no surprise to learn that 92% of large scale projects are late and over budget. This book summarizes his years of experience and what you can do to watch out for problematic situations and better still, avoid getting into them.

He writes that “Most projects start with an answer, for example, renovate your house. Instead, you want to start with the question. ‘Why are you doing this project?’”. It is very important to realize that “Projects are not goals in themselves. Projects are how goals are achieved”.

One of the key points that Flyvbjerg makes is that you don’t want your project to be a unicorn. He realizes that this is not something easy to do as most super-large projects tend to be unique by definition. His very strong recommendation is to break it down into modular pieces. Even if it is unique, try to make it a repetitive bunch of smaller pieces so you pick up experience as you go along. His most compelling example is the empire state building that finished under budget and ahead of schedule. It was constructed in less than 15 months for $24.7 million, which was 57% of the original budget. Their secret was that they treated every floor as a unit and repeated that construction 102 times!

Another key factor in the construction of the Empire State Building is that they assembled the raw materials for construction directly at the site itself. By doing this they eliminated the complexities that arise out of staging all the materials and transporting them between different sites. 

Flyvbjerg makes an often overlooked point that delivery is not always doomed to fail and be late. For most projects, well before the delivery you have the forecast, and “If those forecasts were fundamentally unrealistic, a team expected to meet them would fail, no matter what they did.”

In creating forecasts, he eschews working up an estimate from fundamentals. For complex projects it is hard to estimate everything as there are lots of parts and many unknowns that will be hard to get right. He much prefers “reference forecasting”, where you compare with another similar project and adjust it up or down. For example, if you are doing a kitchen remodel, get an estimate from a friend who has done the same thing and mark it up 20% if you feel you will buy more expensive appliances, or other raw materials than your friend. He quotes Daniel Kahnemann who wrote in thinking fast and slow that reference forecasting is “the single most important piece of advice regarding how to increase accuracy in forecasting”

I learned one interesting piece of trivia. Apparently the word deadline comes from the American Civil War, and it refers to the boundary (line) that prison camps drew, which, if any prisoner crossed they were shot dead. Set a deadline for when you want to start reading this book.