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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?
(Score: 5, Funny) by bob_super on Monday July 01 2019, @10:46PM (5 children)
"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
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
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
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
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
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.