Author: Bent Flyvbjerg, Dan Gardner
Publisher: MacMillian Business
Published on: 2023
Awards and Recognitions:
- Recommended by Daniel Kahneman(Noble Prize winner)
- Mostly possitive rating/review on GoodReads, Amazon, New York Times
- Schroders Business Book of the year 2023
"How Big Things Get Done" by Bent Flyvbjerg is a comprehensive exploration of project management and execution, focusing on why large-scale projects often fail and what can be done to avoid common pitfalls. Flyvbjerg, a leading expert in project management and social science, provides compelling insights backed by extensive research and real-world case studies.
The book delves into high-profile projects like the Sydney Opera House, Olympics games and Boston’s Big Dig, illustrating how optimism bias, strategic misrepresentation, and poor planning lead to delays, budget overruns, and even outright failure. Flyvbjerg's analysis is grounded in decades of research and thousands of projects, making his conclusions both authoritative and practical.
One thing I like about this book is how intuitive the storytelling is. Flyvbjerg uses real-world projects as use cases to break down complex concepts into digestible lessons, making it easy to follow even for those who has no prior experience in project management.
While the book is densely packed with case studies, it does not deep dive into the technical aspects of project management like budget planning, risk management but more of a retrospective of what went well and what went wrong in the past projects - an cultivated wisdom nurtured from glory and downfall of past experiences. Personally, I use this book as a reminder on what to look after and what to avoid before starting and during the project.
Overall, "How Big Things Get Done" is a must-read for anyone looking to understand why large projects often fail and what can be done to ensure success. It’s a blend of theoretical knowledge and practical advice, offering actionable insights for tackling ambitious undertakings. However, if you are looking for an in-depth technical book that covers every aspects of project management such like PMAP, Google Project Management, this is not the book you are looking for.
Key Takeaways (⚠️Spoiler Alert)
1. Think Slow, Act Fast
Flyvbjerg break down project into two general phases, planning phase and delivery phase. "Think slow, act fast" emphasize on planning should be slow and detailed as it is more cost-effective to test and rectify the idea compare to changing stuff in delivery phase. Despite An exhaustive planning enables swift delivery, however it is a challenging striving the balance between "sufficient" planning and the pressure of project timeline and resources.
Here is the definition of "planning" from the book:
A project begins with a vision that is, at best, a vague image of the glorious thing the project will become. Planning is pushing the vision to the point where it is sufficiently researched, analyzed, tested and detailed that we can be confident that we have a reliable road map of the way forward.
2. Avoid Commitment Fallacy
Human is the weakest link in a project as we are tend to influence by psychology and politics. One common mistake is under appreciate progress done in planning phase due to our sense of insecurity when we don't see the tangible shape of the outcome. As a result, people lock-in to the project prematurely, rushing to push the progress to delivery phase, making the project prone to changes or errors that irreversible in the later stage. What make commitment fallacy deadliest is that political pressure and personal ego from decision maker make it so difficult to cut it off but to continuously spending more efforts and resources to restore things, even by the mean of scarifying the initial expected benefit from the project completion, putting the project to a higher risk of failure.
3. Think From Right to Left
Start by defining objectives of the project, analyse the cost and benefits and then setup the plan. A good planning should cover as many questions as possible within a well controlled period of time. Once we know what we are looking for at the end of the project, apply a common technique use in engineering world, "reverse engineering", that is laying out the goals and then figuring out steps on how to achive it, one step in reverse.
One technique given in this book is called the "PR/FAQ". The idea is to prepare two documents, press release and frequent asked questions, once the documents are ready, ask the team whether they are making sense, or anything that they overlooked, gather the feedbacks, further improve the product and iterate the process until the product is good enough.
4. Embrace Experience
If success of a project is challenging, try minimize the possibility of failing the project. In this book, Flyvbjerg promotes the role of "experience" in contributing to the success of a project. An experienced worker has a clearer vision on how to get things done, how to avoid mistakes from the past and what can be done better this time.
My favorite example in this book is the "Eternal Begineer Syndrome" of Olympics Games. The Olympics Games are organized by changing host nation every four years, a new host nation with no prior experience of organizing such huge event is elected, the city's infrastructure has to be in place in time, building up stadiums, athletes' village, and loads of preparation to accommodate millions of visitors coming in for the event. This is why Olympics Games are one of the big project that most likely to overrun budget.
For this issue, the book recommended three approaches to overcome shortage of experience in internal team:
- Pixar's Planning - emphasizes on extensive pre-planning, iteratively went through tests and experiments, collects feedbacks from a wide range of contributors to ensure diverse perspective and improvements which eventually shape the desire outcome.
- Reference Class Forecasting - Analyze projects with similar nature and scope. Use it as reference class or benchmark to your project. Enforce what went well and avoid what wen wrong. For this reason, Flyvberg also advocates the important of keeping a record for each projects, to form a database that can be used as reference class in future.
- Outsource Experience - if it is impossible to seek experience within internal members, outsource the part to external party with experience.
5. Say No to Bad Projects
Don't start a project that is meant to be failed in the first place. The idea of being the first in the world can be a unique selling point for the business but not very attractive in the world of project management. As previously pointed out how important "experience" is in influencing the success of the project, the first of some kind or new of some kind implies that no one have ever done it before, an unknow unknowns situation, thus, increasing the risk of fail. Nevertheless, in real world it is more common that the one that dominate the market is often not the pioneers but the one that comes in later. In short, if given the option to say no to bad project, do not hesitate to do so.
6. Know that the biggest risk is you
The final advice that Flyvberg would give is the ultimate realization of the biggest risk is we, the project manager, who makes decision, coordinate the project, control budget and manage risk. As we play crucial role in a project, a mistake from us can be deadly to the project.
Favorite quotes
- Projects don’t go wrong, they start wrong.
- You want the flight attendant, not the pilot, to be an optimist.
- Planning is progress on the project, often the most cost-effective progress you can achieve.