Comment by KGIII
8 years ago
The Big Dig may have been closer to the budget, except it kept getting changed. An example would be that they initially planned on shutting down certain routes until a politician decided to announce that traffic flow would not be disrupted.
That's great if you're paid to model the traffic but probably not so great if you now have to pay the added expenses.
Just once, I'd like to see the people that planned something and signed the deals stand up to a politician. Just see the demand to make a huge, costly, unreasonable change (likely for political reasons) and say, "No, fuck it. We planned this, you already spent $3 billion on it, it's not changing now. If you want it changed, it's cancelled, the $3b goes up in smoke, along with your political career and everyone who's ever so much as had lunch with you."
I know, it's not realistic... but it would be nice to see. I have this picture in my head of the entire government running like it did in The Pentagon Wars (that's billion, with a "b"...) and nobody can stop it.
Oh, the things I could write... Let's do just that, shall we?
Warning, this could take a minute.
The Big Dig was pretty much my first project outside of the lab. I am not overly fond of admitting to my part in the project but it could be worse, much worse. Truth be told, we did our job just fine, but I digress.
By the time I got involved with the project, it had been in planning stage for quite a while and had undergone a number of revisions and had many funding proposals. My involvement was because I was busy taking traffic modeling into the computer revolution stage.
These various plans all needed to be modeled, of course. Even if there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell, it needed to be modeled. Even trivial changes will mean new modeling. It's lucrative work, if you can get it. Though, it's not much more than a fancy plugin today, it's based on some pretty complicated math and can be improved by adding more data points. Again, I digress...
Now, being new to the world of working as a contractor for municipalities, I had great expectations from the government representatives. I was quickly disabused of such notions but, again, I digress.
The Big Dig had many, many people working on it. It was in the public eye for a fairly short time, compared to the time it lumbered as a meandering project in the planning and pre-planning stage. Yup, they plan to make plans and call it pre-planning. This, of course, goes hand in hand with fact finding, feasibility studies, ecological impact studies, noise studies, and these may very well require constant revision as the plans change.
Well, traffic modeling is just one of those things.
At any point in time, any contractor, sub-contractor, or affiliate could have gone to the media to say just what you propose. In fact, if you examine the archives, I'm sure you'll find ample evidence of people doing just that very thing.
Sure, the amount I made on the project was just a rounding error, but there were a lot of rounding errors.
Then, you have people who will fight it, at every step of the way. They will tie it up in court for as long as they can, which means even more revisions. People sometimes wonder where I got my legal knowledge... Some was in academia but the majority of it was through experience.
There is tons of waste in government, I think we know that. But, politicians will add more - so long as it gets them votes. Interestingly, in this case, the guy campaigned on prosperity for the local economy. The project must not disrupt local business. Got to make money, after all. Yet, it slowed the project down and probably added a good 10% to the overall budget. The lengths we went to were absurd.
And so it goes...
Sure, someone may stand up and tell the politicians that they are insane and that they are stupid but, frankly, we've been saying that for years and nobody actually listens. We can't opt out, because we have contracts.
Oh, contracts? Yeah, every time you extended the project? I got a nice bonus to help grow my business. Every time I had to run the models again? Thanks... Every time I had to go get more data? Thanks...
The Big Dig was what enabled me to get my business up and functioning. We had more contracts before the first year was over and that project seemed to last forever.
I can see why people would just go along for the ride. If I'd had more insight and experience, I may have said something. I doubt it old have done any good, I'd have still had contractual obligations and the penalty clauses would have meant I was a poor man today.
Well, there is a wall of text. Make of it what you will, I guess. It is summed up with contracts, politicians, municipal workers, and citizen expectations.
> There is tons of waste in government, I think we know that. But, politicians will add more - so long as it gets them votes. Interestingly, in this case, the guy campaigned on prosperity for the local economy. The project must not disrupt local business. Got to make money, after all. Yet, it slowed the project down and probably added a good 10% to the overall budget. The lengths we went to were absurd.
Contrast that to the Canada line in Vancouver, which was built using a cut-and-cover method. All the business owners in the Cambie corridor were convinced that this would be a minimal disruption to their business.
By the time construction was done, every single merchant along the corridor went out of business. Strangely enough, cut-and-cover proposals for more subway lines in Vancouver are as dead as a Monty Python parrot.
6 replies →
But that indicates the project was not planned well since change requests for such a large project would have been expected.
You can only plan on so much.
Notably: I only modeled traffic. I am not to blame. ;-)
(I have used that caveat so many times.)
Maybe so, but I'm referring to the actual project management process group called Planning I don't mean plan in general but the actual official and formal steps of Planning.
Then the Monitoring and Control process group will evaluate Planning again each time it loops back, so it makes no sense to me their plan failed, multiple times really for each loop. It's even worse knowing that each time they come back to Planning as part of the process they screwed up yet again.
Politicians will always find a way to promise changes to big ticket items. They're the ones that hold the purse strings. You can't plan for whomever is going to be in office next year ("a week is a long time in politics").
Case in point: it was only 17 months from Trump announcing his candidacy to winning the election - plus his party put up over 20 nominees.
How does one plan around a politician making it up as they go?