Around 10 years ago Bent Flyvberg published an overview of his work on mega project management in the Project Management Journal. The article is a useful and compact read in the context of his continued work where he explores the reasons why high-profile projects like HS2 go catastrophically wrong. His ‘Iron Law of Mega Projects’ is simple: ‘Over budget, over time, under benefits, over and over again’.
Flyvberg continues to expound his ideas about the mismanagement of mega-projects, and the world continues to supply him with ample real life case studies which strongly suggest that he is right about his observations and prescriptions. However, most of us will never have the privilege(?) of managing a multi-billion pound project with strategic national effect. This has led me to explore whether some of Flyberg’s work can be transposed to the more normal workplaces in which most of us operate.
I have been fortunate to have had the opportunity to work, talk and listen alongside scores of organisations over the years as they explain the issues and frustrations they encounter with minor and major projects. Just as Flyvberg suggests, their exasperations boil down to being over budget, over time and under benefits, again and again. But there is something else that I notice repeatedly: The activity they term as ‘strategy’ is not actually strategic. How does this happen?
We need to accept that Strategy is inherently political. This is how Flyvberg explains ‘survival of unfittest’ in project proposals and delivery. The label ‘strategy’ confers authority, and so it gets plastered indiscriminately across everything and anything, large and small, allowing bad ideas traction and causing endless white noise. Managers need to challenge this. Indeed, Flyvberg suggests that successful projects are as much about stopping or avoiding counterproductive activities as promoting good ones. There is a hard reality here, which is that only a very few activities in an organisation can be truly strategic. Here is how spot them:
A strategy is aligned with the organisation’s core value proposition.
A strategy is endorsed by the highest authority.
A strategy represents a decisive allocation of resources.
A strategy represents a distinct choice of activity as opposed to others.
If a project fails most or all of these requirements then it can be many things, but it is not strategic. When I put this to organisations, I encounter some regretful faces when people realise that their projects are not in fact a strategy level activity. I also see some worry in the marketing department when they realise that promising everything to everyone all the time is not a strategy. Mostly however, I see relief. Many managers are overburdened by manifold and conflicting requirements but lack a framework through which they can evaluate and, where necessary, reject them. Flyvberg points out that mega-projects often fail because they have to satisfy an ever-increasing number of political interest groups on the national stage. But there is a lesson here for small and medium sized enterprises too. Unless a strategy is tightly defined, correctly authorised and sufficiently resourced then, like the space shuttle Challenger launch disaster and Crossrail, it has failure baked-in. Such activities are not worth a manager’s scarce time and effort. Though it is often an unwelcome message, identifying and cancelling these ideas from the outset is one of the valuable services to an organisation that a manger can perform.
Flyvbjerg, B. (2009). Survival of the unfittest: why the worst infrastructure gets built—and what we can do about it. Oxford review of economic policy, 25(3), 344-367.
Flyvbjerg, B. (2014). What you should know about megaprojects and why: An overview. Project management journal, 45(2), 6-19.
Flyvbjerg, B. Introduction: The Iron Law of Megaproject Management. Bent Flyvbjerg, 2017, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Megaproject Management, Oxford University Press, Chapter 1, pp. 1-18.
Flyvbjerg, B. (2021). Top ten behavioral biases in project management: An overview. Project Management Journal, 52(6), 531-546.