Leading Complex Projects

INTRODUCTIONEXECUTIVE SUMMARY

There is general agreement throughout the industrial world that large complex projects have had a very rough go. There have been a number of books and articles published seeking to diagnose why the track record has been so bleak and even (somewhat naïve) calls to stop doing megaprojects altogether in the future.¹ The problems are not new and have been documented by academics, the trade press, and occasionally even the daily news for at least 30 years.² Nor are the problems confined to any particular sector. Flyvbjerg et al. document the problems in public infrastructure projects.³ Merrow (2011) has reported the record of the petroleum, chemicals, and minerals industries.⁴ It's not a pretty picture. Megaprojects fail more than twice as often as their under-$1 billion counterparts using the same criteria for failure.

Amidst all this discussion of failure it is easy to overlook the fact that about one complex project in three is highly successful. The successes are too numerous to be dismissed as flukes. In Industrial Megaprojects (2011) we showed that when large complex projects followed a particular set of practices, they were quite likely to generate not just good but genuinely excellent outcomes. This indicated that success and failure were not in any sense random. What we could not satisfactorily explain is why relatively so few megaprojects actually employed sound practices. The failure to do so could not be explained by ignorance because the ...