99.5% of Projects Don’t Go As Planned

Oxford economist Bent Flyvbjerg is an expert on failure. Research for his book “How Big Things Get Done” included “16,000 skyscrapers, airports, museums, concert halls, nuclear reactors, and hydroelectric dams across 136 countries.”

Making the Museum, you see, is all about strategies to help exhibition projects happen on time, on budget, to rave reviews. So Flyvbjerg’s statistics about major projects make me both nervous and determined:

47.9% are delivered on budget.
8.5% are delivered on budget, and on time.
0.5% are delivered on budget, on time, and with the expected benefits.

One project in that very rare 0.5% is the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. The reason, per Flyvbjerg, is the years of planning done by the designers before starting to build.

(You can learn all the secrets of that project from one of the planning masters of that project, Andy Klemmer, in this episode of Making the Museum, the podcast.)

Here’s the thing:
Spending extra time and resources on planning a project isn’t a luxury. It’s one of the only ways to avoid being in the 99.5% of projects that don’t go as planned.

Warmly,
Jonathan

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MtM Word of the Day:
Project management. The process of planning, organizing, and controlling resources to achieve a project's goals. Goals often include being done on time, within budget, and to the satisfaction of stakeholders. (Not the same as ongoing “management” because projects have finite outcomes and end dates.)