Book Review: How Big Things Get Done - Lessons From the World's Top Project Manager by Bent Flyvbjerg, Dan Gardner

Infrastructure is impossible. You have to wrangle thousands of people over dozens of months, with a budget of millions, to deliver something made of hundreds of plans, which has to fit seamlessly into the world. How does any infrastructure get built?

It mostly doesn't. This is the terrifying true story of all the different ways big projects fail.

If you've ever been part of a big IT project, some of the themes will give you flashbacks. What kills me is how normalised this has become. We all know that predicted budgets are little more than crystal-ball gazing. We can see that tiny blockers now lead to catastrophes later on.

In plain English, minor changes combined in a way to produce a disaster. In complex systems, that happens so often that the Yale sociologist Charles Perrow called such events “normal accidents.”

This is as much about human psychology as it is planning. Take this example:

“I once asked an engineer why their cost estimates were invariably underestimated and he simply answered, ‘if we gave the true expected outcome costs nothing would be built.’”

Does that ring true to you? Whether you're justifying your own bit of home DIY, or trying to get a multi-billion project off the ground, of course you're going to lie to yourself!

What I love about the book is that it isn't just pointing and snarking. There are excellent suggestions in there; use experts, plan for disaster, do repeatable actions. Nothing revolutionary - but worth hammering into people's brains.

Most big projects are not the first, tallest, biggest, or anything else too remarkable.

It all comes down to the boring magic of standards. Find a standardised way to do something and iterate on that.

The book is, necessarily, a little dry. I think it could have benefited from a few illustrations. Sometimes a little help visualising data is necessary. Some of the megaprojects could have photos to help demonstrate the scale.

It starts as a somewhat jolly romp through grand failures but, by the end, becomes an urgent plea.

In our present situation, wasted resources and wasted time are a threat to civilization.

We don't have the luxury of wasting billions. We don't have the time to do things twice. Grandiose plans based on untested technology aren't going to save us from the climate crisis.

An excellent book for understanding the reality of building anything.