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

One way to design and deliver a project on an enormous scale is to build one thing. One huge thing. Monju is one huge thing. Most nuclear power plants are. So are giant hydroelectric dams, high-speed rail lines such as that in California, and mammoth IT projects and skyscrapers. If you build like this, you build only one thing. By definition, that thing is one of a kind. To put that in the language of tailors, it is bespoke: no standard parts, no commercial off-the-shelf products, no simple repetition of what was done last time. And that translates into slow and complex. Nuclear power plants, for one, are the products of a staggering number of bespoke parts and systems that must all work, and work together, for the plant as a whole to work. Complex bespokeness alone makes huge projects hard to deliver if done in this manner. But that is compounded by several more factors. First, you can’t build a nuclear power plant quickly, run it for a while, see what works and what doesn’t, then change the design to incorporate the lessons learned. It’s too expensive and dangerous. That means that experimentation—one-half of the experiri I discussed in chapter 4—is out. You have no choice but to get it right the first time.

Exact same thing applies to software IT projects as to the bespoke(unique) software