By Bill Franklin P.Eng.

Introduction

Every enterprise encounters new challenges to their business and must innovate. Competitors with new products or services may require profound changes in the character and substance of the company to address the competition or fulfill new needs. Witness the incredible rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and the reverberations throughout industry, data analytics, media, management, and investment. Canada’s own remarkable success story, the City of Waterloo’s RIM (Research in Motion), the Blackberry, a device that found its way into the hands of people and presidents worldwide, only to come crashing down to earth with the rise of Apple’s iPhone in 2007, the brainchild of Steve Jobs.

Cities, towns and colleges have no less of a challenge. Look at the rise and fall of international students that has hugely impacted finances of universities and colleges. This large shift in numbers has impacted everything from a drastic decline in student numbers to a major drop in parking demand and its associated revenue. Cities in particular have unique challenges getting to the finish line. Politicians change every few years, key initiatives vary in terms of substance and date,  decisions more consensus based, volatile funding, public reaction unpredictable, media criticism uncomfortable. All makes for a bigger challenge than private industry generally faces.

In this series of articles, we will look at techniques to overcome the challenge of moving a promising concept to successful delivery. It is a perilous journey. A sizeable percentage of large projects in private and public enterprises will be late, over budget, have 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.

In the Globe & Mail’s Report on Business¹, an article featuring Professor Bent Flyvjerg, Oxford University, illustrates the challenges of large projects and in particular, large government projects. His research over the past 30 years finds that the vast majority of large projects hugely  over promise and sizably under deliver:  economic benefits are less, project costs significantly higher than anticipated, and delays accumulate into a completion date far beyond that promised. “Only 8.5% of projects hit the mark on both cost and time,” Flyvbjerg has found².

However, Bent Flyvjerg is one of many who have encountered and studied the challenge of delivering an ambitious initiative. 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.

Project management is not new. Consider the Romans and their remarkable aqueducts. These magnificent engineering accomplishments carried water for dozens of kilometers or more from water sources to towns. A very famous example is the 50 km aqueduct from Fontaine d’Eure near Uzès to Nemausus (now Nîmes) built 2000 years ago. Located in Provence, France, this aqueduct carried 40,000 m³ of water every day! It required numerous bridges of which the most outstanding and famous is the Pont de Gard bridge. The bridge spans the Gardon river, with a span of 330 meters and maximum height of 50 meters.³ The feature image shows an image the author captured in 2014.

One can imagine the scale of the challenge, design, logistics, materials, transport, people, food, sanitation, animals for transporting and lifting materials, among a myriad of other things. Your author was deeply humbled when visiting the site with his wife. We think everything today is new. It is not.

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, or 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, new knowledge.

New initiatives typically have some of these characteristics:

• New products, systems, services
• Substantially new products, systems, services
• Wholly internal development
• Wholly external development defined and built and supplied by one vendor
• Substantial cutting edge technology
• Current technology
• Wholly external development with multiple vendors managed by the city
• Contract to build, where the primary design is by the City
• Public Private Partnership
• Phased development

There are other aspects of course, but the theme is the same. A new initiative that is outside of normal daily operational duties and requires skills and knowledge that is not in the organization’s normal day to day operation.

To better illustrate a realistic new initiative, let’s define a medium sized city, say 200,000 residents, that wants to completely rethink their parking: methodology, policies, pricing, parkades, facilitating downtown business and a vibrant people friendly city center. Our overriding goal will be a city where residents enjoy their forays into downtown, whether work or play, and speak highly of their city to friends and family in other cities.

Will the endeavour result in a boondoggle or bonanza?

In the next article, we will look at requisite preparatory work to lay the foundation for a successful project.

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

REFERENCES

1 October 2025, G&M Report on Business, “TIME TO PONI UP” by John Lorinc Pages 14-15

2 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

3 Wikipedia has a superb article on the Pont de Gard bridge:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pont_du_Gard