By Bill Franklin, P.Eng. 

Introduction

In the first article in Q4 Parker, we examined why a city needs to start a large project. Initiatives to address population growth or changing demographics, aging infrastructure and technology, environmental changes such as torrential rain and resulting flooding number but a few. All significant projects that fall outside of regular operational activities require skills and knowledge that are not part of the city’s everyday toolkit.

In this second in a series of essays, we will look at techniques to overcome the challenge of moving a promising concept to successful delivery. It is a perilous journey as a sizeable percentage of large projects in private and public enterprises will be late, over budget, suffer serious deficiencies and encounter scathing criticism. For example, the cost of operation may be too high, delivery of services too slow, usability unacceptable, media coverage harsh. Projects in dire straits risk being halted.

As Professor Bent Flyvjerg, Oxford University has found in his 30 years of research, most large projects and in particular, large government projects fail to meet their objectives. “Only 8.5% of projects hit the mark on both cost and time,” Flyvbjerg has found. Moreover, the size of the project is relative. A small organization will struggle with a project which may be considered small to a large enterprise. None the less, the challenges are similar.

Scope

To begin, it is helpful to define an initiative that meets the criteria of a project and will require project management to deliver. Typically, this is a one-off endeavour that will deliver something new or substantially new. It is not a routine daily activity such as invoicing, policing or services or any other regular scheduled activity. Rather it is, by definition, a new initiative requiring new ideas, new techniques, new knowledge, potentially new people and, crucially but paradoxically, people already schooled in the art.

New initiatives typically have some of these characteristics:

• New or substantially new products, systems, services and cutting-edge technology
• Wholly internal development
• Wholly external development defined and built and supplied by one vendor
• Wholly external development with multiple vendors managed by the city
• Public Private Partnership
• Protracted development

There are other aspects of course, but the theme is the same. A new initiative that is outside of normal daily operational duties will require the city to search, acquire, and upgrade skills and knowledge to prepare for the new project.

To paraphrase what Donald Rumsfeld once famously said:

• There are known knowns
• There are unknown knowns
• Then there are unknown unknowns

Without people skilled in the art, the unknowns will abound and the risk of a project going off the rails is high.

Defining the Dream & Conceptual Integrity

One of the single most critical elements to a successful project is a well-defined definition of what it is. All successful projects and launches accurately define the product or system, what it is, what are its goals, its operating metrics: how big, how fast, how much cargo, how efficient, how much it will cost, who will use it, the benefits.

Frederick Brooks, Ph.D. published a series of brilliant essays on managing large software projects, experience garnered while at IBM as the lead project manager for the development of the phenomenally successful IBM System/360 mainframe computers in the 1960’s and 1970’s. This project employed thousands of engineers and software designers and broke new ground in computer engineering and computing capabilities.

Mr. Brooks’ seminal book, The Mythical Man-Month, assessed, analyzed and distilled many aspects that make a project successful or unsuccessful. In his view, the most important is a concept Brooks called Conceptual Integrity.

Conceptual Integrity has these attributes:

• Has one leading person with a handful of other contributing people that manage or monitor every significant feature and design of the system
• A well-defined description of the product or system and a detailed description of who the users are and how they will use it
• Features and functions operate smoothly and reliably with simplicity and intuitiveness. Aspects that seem out of place, disconnected or random are rare or non-existent. These concepts apply to any system from information systems to transportation.
• Descriptions are fleshed out with use cases that provide better insight and drill deeper into details, for example a new citywide parking system may include:
  • User interfaces including ease of use, intuitive operation
  • Data communications
  • Online Payment systems
  • System architecture, data flow, time constraints, error recovery
  • Feasibility of cutting-edge technology or current technology used in a new way
    • For example, integrating different and new vendors’ products into a cohesive smoothly running system
    • Veracity and reliability of new products. Testing and verifying is critical.
  • User enrolment
  • Security: physical and data
  • People: usability for people with disabilities, different cultures (e.g. language)
  • Legal, e.g. information privacy, appeals
  • Aesthetics: look and feel of equipment or applications
  • Multi-vendor implications such as responsiveness to incidents, fault isolation and remedy
  • Testing: all functions, durability, redundancy
  • Auditing operation and in field monitoring
  • Among many others

The lead architect of the system to be developed and who holds the conceptual integrity role facilitates the goals of the project. Ideas and good intentions are fed into the hopper, and it is the architect’s job to ensure they are congruent. Moreover, all projects have a finite time, budget and set of features that can be accommodated. Conceptual integrity facilitates parsimonious pursuit of project goals and limits feature creep, budget overrun and schedule slip.

Apple provides great examples of conceptual integrity philosophy. When the first iPhone was launched, it was a smash hit with intuitive operation, reliability, features and applications that knit together in smooth and coordinated fashion. Yet Apple spent USD$150 million and employed 1000 technical people for 30 months to design and build the iPhone. This is a huge project by any measure. All through the project, Steve Jobs defined the dream and was owner of the conceptual integrity. Features and functions were examined for optimal fit. Jobs personally used and tested early iPhone pre-release versions and demanded changes if the iPhones features or functionality did not meet his demanding standard. A great example is his insightful choice of Corning’s incredibly tough guerilla glass that enabled an expansive and durable surface for a sophisticated yet easy to use iPhone.

Wikipedia’s review of the iPhone contrasts the idea of a small tight team owning a product’s conceptual integrity with the classic ugly alternative: “Apple rejected the “design by committee” approach that had yielded the Motorola ROKR E1, a largely unsuccessful “iTunes phone” made in collaboration with Motorola.”

San Francisco’s Golden Gate bridge is also a terrific example of conceptual integrity. The chief engineer and proponent of the bridge, Joeseph Strauss, was the owner of the bridge’s conceptual integrity. He worked with three others to create a brilliant and beautiful bridge incorporating elegant architecture, robust structural engineering, and pragmatic design that to this day provides San Francisco with a durable and attractive structure that crosses the Golden Gate Strait. It facilitates commercial and commuter traffic and knits Marin County and north to Santa Rosa and beyond with easy access to San Franciso. And true to form, the bridge was built on time and on budget.

Other superb Canadian examples of conceptual integrity are the brilliant innovation of Tobias Lütke (co-founder and CEO of Shopify) to make setting up online shops easy, and Research in Motion (RIM) in its early years with founders Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie. RIM’s Blackberry achieved phenomenal success, and one can see the iron grip of Mike Lazaridis keeping the evolving Blackberry product true to its roots.

In our next article, we’ll analyze what are the fundamental prerequisites needed to execute and deliver a well-defined project on time, on budget, and satisfy customers: Skills, Smarts, Strategy & The Plan.

About the author: Bill Franklin, P.Eng.,President, Tannery Creek Systems

REFERENCES

1. How Big Things Get Done, a 2023 book by Bent Flyvjerg & Dan Gardner that distills years of research on more than 16,000 big projects
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone#Models