Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Monday July 01 2019, @07:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the You-Thought-Your-Builders-Were-Bad dept.

Stories about seriously mangled public infrastructure projects keep coming up and even the alleged super-efficient Germans are not exempt. But what would you expect when you change and expand the project while it is being implemented and when you use smaller contractors with no track record for projects like this? the BBC has the story:

As a structure, it looks impressive enough.

Until you pause, look around you, and absorb the silence. This is Berlin Brandenburg or BER, the new, state-of-the-art international airport built to mark reunified Germany's re-emergence as a global destination.

It is a bold new structure, costing billions, and was supposed to be completed in 2012.

But it has never opened.

BER has become for Germany not a new source of pride but a symbol of engineering catastrophe. It's what top global infrastructure expert Bent Flyvbjerg calls a "national trauma" and an ideal way "to learn how not to do things".

[...]Martin Delius, a former Berlin city politician who later headed an extensive inquiry into what went wrong, says those in charge decided "to give 30 to 40 contracts to smaller companies which they thought they could pressurise into giving them lower prices".

"They built a very complex controlling system which didn't work," he says.

Most disruptive of all were decisions to change the size and content of the new airport - while it was being built.

[...]New construction boss Hartmut Mehdorn made a list of all the faults and failures, Mr Delius tells me.

"Small ones like the wrong light bulbs to big ones like all the cables are wrong," he says.

The final total was 550,000 - more than a half a million problems to fix.

Maybe that builder who left a big hole in your dining room wall for a couple of weeks wasn't so bad after all? It wasn't like seven years later, was it?


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 01 2019, @09:53PM (13 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 01 2019, @09:53PM (#862169)

    So, Agile doesn't work for infrastructure projects then?

    Starting Score:    0  points
    Moderation   +2  
       Interesting=1, Touché=1, Total=2
    Extra 'Touché' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by DECbot on Monday July 01 2019, @10:19PM

    by DECbot (832) on Monday July 01 2019, @10:19PM (#862182) Journal

    I've heard arguments that it doesn't work for software projects either. Perhaps this airport should be an example taught in business school for PHBs to understand what changing requirements mid-project causes.

    --
    cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
  • (Score: 5, Funny) by bob_super on Monday July 01 2019, @10:46PM (5 children)

    by bob_super (1357) on Monday July 01 2019, @10:46PM (#862190)

    "the rebar is late"
    "Okay, let's shift 'laying rebar' to the next release, which means delaying 'pouring foundation' too, but because of 'walls' taking resources in the next sprint, we need to bump 'foundation' down two sprints. How's 'Roof' progressing ?"
    "The roofers said something about going to Bethlehem to find a carpenter who can pull miracles and save this job"

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02 2019, @12:45AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02 2019, @12:45AM (#862227)

      "The roofers said something about going to Bethlehem to find a carpenter who can pull miracles and save this job"

      I hear the last time that carpenter was near a hammer things got crossed up.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by MostCynical on Tuesday July 02 2019, @01:36AM

      by MostCynical (2589) on Tuesday July 02 2019, @01:36AM (#862246) Journal

      Torn between "insightful" and "funny", but your post is not funny..

      I have worked on one projet where there were trained srum masters and the like, and genuine "Agile" development

      Everywhere else "agile" just means "waterfall with lots of bits left until later", which doesn't work with construction..

      --
      "I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by goodie on Tuesday July 02 2019, @01:52AM

      by goodie (1877) on Tuesday July 02 2019, @01:52AM (#862250) Journal

      I once interviewed a software architect who was involved in an "agile" project. He basically used this analogy (I was just happy it was not about cars...): if you want to do agile, I'll assemble things quickly with a wobbly base and it will hold, but it may not hold for 10-15 years or allow for low level changes later on. His point was that his time horizon was so different from that of the devs who were working on this agile projects that they just had different, almost irreconcilable perspectives and goals.

    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by DECbot on Tuesday July 02 2019, @04:53AM

      by DECbot (832) on Tuesday July 02 2019, @04:53AM (#862283) Journal

      Bethlehem? He'll get better rates from India and they will have a product in half the time. Look, just pour the concrete now and when it is ready, we'll update the foundation by pile-driving the rebar into place.

      --
      cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday July 02 2019, @02:27PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 02 2019, @02:27PM (#862396)

      There's a side aspect of "emperor has no clothes" going on, where all the grunts in the trenches who've ever labored on a construction project know all this stuff in their bones, but now you need to be a trained and annointed pure master of project BS to declare in public that you can't install the roof until the walls can hold it up or whatever. And the project delays in the old days were caused by the laborers rescheduling things on their own like not installing the plumbing until the walls are up, and now that we've got a very expensive centrally controlled fall guy he can say the same thing the tradesmen used to, just more wrongly and more expensively and more slowly.

      And don't forget classic cargo cult and religious purity law behavior.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 01 2019, @11:06PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 01 2019, @11:06PM (#862193)

    Anything can fail if executed poorly. The reverse is almost always true too.

    In fact when I speak about agile methods I always use construction as the example of when traditional techniques tend to work better due to the predictable nature of the work.

    Agile (done well) excels MORE THAN OTHER TECHNIQUES in chaotic environments.

    Nothing guarantees success though and many people say they are doing 'agile' when they are not.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02 2019, @12:43AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02 2019, @12:43AM (#862226)

      The "true agile" argument is very close to the "true free market" one.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 02 2019, @01:24PM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 02 2019, @01:24PM (#862371) Journal
        Namely, that it gets blamed for situations where it wasn't even remotely applied?
  • (Score: 0, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02 2019, @12:43AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02 2019, @12:43AM (#862225)

    So, Agile doesn't work for infrastructure projects then?

    Agile works great for infrastructure projects, as long as your end goal is to have infrastructure that works as well as Agile does on infrastructure projects.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02 2019, @06:03AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02 2019, @06:03AM (#862297)

    I'm trained in both classic and agile project management. There's actually (and I guess this isn't common knowledge at this stage) a coherent body of knowledge being created that encompasses the two approaches, and helps define when either approach is appropriate.

    Agile is not going to get you anything you want when everything can be planned, specified and tracked from Day 1. If there's a set of rails, classic (what is called "predictive" project management by the cool kids) project management will choo-choo you down those rails without surprises, and without drama.

    On the other hand, predictive project management comes to a nasty halt where the rails stop, and the gravel starts. Can't predict more than a couple of months out because of inherent complexities? Predictive project management maps will give you a white space with HERE BE DRAGONNES. Or lies. Beautiful, tightly predicted lies. Agile says: "OK, we know where we want to go, we know what we'll need, let's hike to the top of this ridge and see what we discover. And let's not spend any more yet than this hike requires."

    If you think either one is going to save the world, you're in for a nasty shock.

    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday July 02 2019, @02:37PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 02 2019, @02:37PM (#862401)

      Can't predict more than a couple of months out because of inherent complexities?

      The big complexities are monopolies and profit.

      You can project manage your companies 25th sportsball stadium complex real estate development project. You can't project manage a software project that will only make a profit if we invent something literally new and completely unique that we, we in the sense of species not just company, have never done before. And second place means typically no profits, or perhaps 3rd or 4th place means no profits.

      You can project manage the construction of the 56789th Catholic church building. You can't project manage the next dude (or dude-ette) to be cannonized as a saint.

      There are analogies with quantum physics in that you can't project manage a single unique atom into responding simultaneously with certain Heisenberg limited measurements. Although you can VERY successfully "project manage" a steam engine cylinder full of those atoms into behaving under the rules of classical thermodynamics very effectively and profitably.

      A lot of business projects fail because the managers don't understand the difference between stamping out license plates with more logistical efficiency than the competition vs inventing the idea of developing a machine to stamp out license plates.