How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between

by Bent Flyvbjerg

But if a project is falling behind, managers don’t want to wait until the next milestone arrives before they are alerted to the delay. They need to know and act as quickly as possible. Our data were so detailed that we could make a further set of subforecasts, so we invented “inchstones.” And we specified in detail beforehand who would be responsible for what. If MTR started falling behind under the new schedule, managers would know immediately, and they would know who must act, so no time would be wasted. With the Hong Kong government, we developed the inchstone approach into a general methodology based on artificial intelligence, which today is used on other Hong Kong projects and can be used on any project anywhere.[32]