How did MTR know that its delivery was failing? By the schedule and budget slipping. But slippage was measured against MTR’s forecasts of how long and how costly the various stages of the project would be. If those forecasts were fundamentally unrealistic, a team expected to meet them would fail no matter what they did. The delivery would be doomed before it started. That should be obvious. But when things go wrong and people get desperate, the obvious is often overlooked, and it’s assumed that if delivery fails, the problem must lie with delivery, when in fact it lies with forecasting.
