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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: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 01 2019, @08:11PM (1 child)
Maybe they can get together with Denver airport's baggage handling department and learn how they finally managed their way out of that disaster.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 01 2019, @08:24PM
I'm pretty sure it was legalizing marijuana that solved that issue.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 01 2019, @08:20PM (8 children)
A shining example of what Germany has become under Mommy Merkel. The two major parties abandoned their bases and quit trying to compete, all effort goes into remaining in power. A mainstream media that paints anyone proposing policies to help actual German citizens as "populist" or even "Nazi". Billion dollar projects destined to become ruins. Inability to control who comes into the country, but mercilessly fining ordinary people for having their car mirror out of place.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 01 2019, @10:17PM (3 children)
How I wish I didn't predict the existence of this shitpost.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 01 2019, @11:23PM (2 children)
Does virtue signaling get you all hard?
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 01 2019, @11:34PM (1 child)
Why are you looking for hard penises?
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 01 2019, @11:35PM
Because hard penises are not looking for him?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02 2019, @06:08AM (2 children)
What is the longest tenure for a British PM? I can only remember Thatcher who was in power for about 10 years. Germany on the other hand suffered 16 years under Kohl and now 14 years under Merkel.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02 2019, @06:52AM (1 child)
If you mean contiguous, it's thin, but Gladstone clocked a dozen or so years across a few parliaments, as did one of his competitors, the Marquess of Salisbury.
If you go right back to the early days, Walpole was in it for about twenty years, but you could make an argument that he wasn't elected as we understand it today.
Pitt was in place for a similar period, but in general it has been the exception rather than the rule.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Wednesday July 03 2019, @10:51AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Prime_Ministers_of_the_United_Kingdom_by_tenure [wikipedia.org]
Recent PMs
Thatcher (con) 11 years, 209 days
Major (con) 6 years, 154 days
Blair (lab) 10 years, 56 days
Brown (lab) 2 years, 319 days
Cameron (con) 6 years, 63 days
May (con) 3 years, 11 days (planned)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by driverless on Thursday July 04 2019, @08:49AM
And what's really impressive is that the entire debacle started long before Merkel ever came into power. Just think of how clever this conspiracy really is, they planned and initiated a multibillion dollar fiasco just so that, in the future when Merkel came to power, the MAGA-hatters could have something to blame her for.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by donkeyhotay on Monday July 01 2019, @08:22PM (25 children)
After years of dealing with buggy software and operating systems, it seems like the world has become more accepting of all kinds of sub-standard tools and equipment. Now it looks like major engineering jobs are being managed like software development projects, with predictable results.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Rupert Pupnick on Monday July 01 2019, @08:46PM (12 children)
There’s also a perception that standards based, modular and highly integrated technology reduces complicated tasks to snapping together Legos. It doesn’t.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 01 2019, @09:02PM
Hey, those managers had Legos as kids, it always worked that way for them...
https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?S=2922-1#T=S&O={%22iconly%22:0} [bricklink.com]
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 4, Interesting) by goodie on Tuesday July 02 2019, @01:48AM (4 children)
I read this while taking a break from writing a paper on how modern software development practices and technologies make things more complicated rather than simpler than they used to. Of course our software do more than they used to but our dependence on others (whom we have no idea of often) and our ignorance of the ramifications of this increasing dependence make things very complex (as in complexity science too!). Happy to know I'm not crazy to think this... Now I just need reviewers to stop thinking it's not cool enough because it does not drink the kool aid.
Ok back to work now, full of motivation again :)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday July 02 2019, @02:09PM (3 children)
Given the culture of this site please submit an article when you complete the paper. Assuming we don't have to subscribe to journal "X" to read the paper, etc.
I've been in this game since '81 and my gut level impression is trying to eliminate complexity is like squishing a balloon, it just squooshes out somewhere else, typically somewhere unpredictable always somewhere more expensive. Older more "unix" ways of doing things were small simple tools and that let the complexity live elsewhere, like in the architecture of systems using the tools or ... well, somewhere other than the small elegant code, anyways. Capitalism and non-FOSS require vertical silos to increase profit so all software no matter how small the original scope eventually poorly re-implements emacs and has a checkbox list of unused features thats multiple pages long. That requires complexity in the code and crashes dev projects with no survivors. The "solution" is to squoosh the complexity balloon to push complexity out of coding into absurdly complex ritualistic development systems that have generally never been successfully implemented in any other complex developement technology (like major military ops or construction projects or non-computer research projects). Needless to say squooshing the complexity balloon to send complexity shrapnel screaming thru the dev trenches causes worse problems and delays that the original problem.
On one hand, I'm pessimistic because of the analogy that medicine will never work because we're at the level of leeches and that was stupid, or heavier than air flight is impossible because no mechanic has successfully cloned every detail of a really giant seagull. On the other hand I'm pragmatic in the sense that no level of effort will ever make mechanistic astrology "work" as its critics explain, or no amount of religious purity law implementation will "trick" god into obeying a mere human.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday July 02 2019, @02:58PM (1 child)
A system always grow more complex, until/unless something more simple (and genuinely original) is able to replace it. I think that transcends development into all forms of systems theory. If you're a believer in evolutionary theory, this isn't always a negative. I'd rather be me than an ameoba (although some would question if there is a difference...)
Complete replacement, however, is often more effort than maintenance of the prior system, or transformation of the prior system which but seldom actually reduces the complexity and instead only redistributes it.
Personally, I blame entropy.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by goodie on Tuesday July 02 2019, @06:47PM
That's the thing that is so fascinating to me. Software is really now the product of series of uncoordinated moves by heterogeneous groups of actors working on their own thing and using one another's artifacts to build something of their own. And the process repeats itself over and over...
Where it gets ugly is when you see that we have little to no visibility on what we depend on. When the heartbleed vulnerability was discovered, everybody freaked out because they suddenly realized that one of the most critical pieces of software they depend on was maintained by two (I think?) overworked people. Yet so many products depend on it.
Same with refactoring. If we use stuff like structural complexity measures, we can reduce it through refactoring. But if the refactoring involves using other frameworks, dependencies, etc. our own code might have low structural complexity but the code that we depend on might be crap. But we won't see that because we will depend on the packaged version 99% of the time. Same principle with microservices: low complexity, limited scope. But pieced together they can create a huge mess of interdependence. Why do you have a dependency on an XML parser? Because the devs from a dependency 4 levels down did not remove it when they moved to JSON. Or something like that...
(Score: 2) by goodie on Tuesday July 02 2019, @06:41PM
If it ever gets accepted somewhere, i'll pay the open access fee if there is one. Thank for the vote of confidence!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02 2019, @03:09AM (5 children)
It does if what you are making does not change what it is half-way through. It's all the "Agile" and "Innovation" that ruins complicated projects. The standards change, module definintions change, and everything is always tryign to hit a moving fucking target.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02 2019, @05:41AM (4 children)
So .... you'd rather build something, specified to the n'th degree? I've been there.
Here's how it goes:
First you have six months (if you're lucky) of getting requirements defined. And boy, do those business analysts get that right. Hell, yeah. They will march up to your desk, having worked all night, and slam down a document that's all of four hundred pages, plus another seven hundred of appendices detailing everything from accessibility requirements through auditing facilities and legal review systems down to the sequence of steps for HA failover in case of a hurricane. (Those of you who think I'm exaggerating have never worked in this kind of environment. Lucky bastards.)
Now the architectural wrangling begins in earnest. Sure, it already grumbled before, but now the gloves come off. Program managers, project managers and assorted other organisers float around, trying to work out what needs to be done, and in what order, so that they can build the tightly specified GANTT chart from hell. If you're lucky, it's only 6 feet of tight printout taped to the wall. In the mean time, the list of specifications grows. If you're smart, you have a document repository complete with SharePoint admins and a DBA managing the madness - but hey, you're a professional, right? We have to know what we're doing. And now we're a year in without having cut so much as a single module of code, but that's what you need to do it right!
Now the grind starts, and immediately you run into the imponderables, the unreviewed assumptions and the shifting grounds. The unions want a new contract, complete with changing requirements. The management have a new buzzword, and want a different DB because a saleshole convinced them it was necessary. The activist shareholders need it to be otherkin friendly because what are you, a NAZI??? No, of course you're not, you're a professional and you're cranking that code like the good little hamster you are. Oh, and the federal regulations governing it all have changed three times since you've started, and show no signs of stopping. Don't want to comply? That's OK, they can't make you comply - but they sure as hell can make you want to. The project managers are sweating blood, updating those charts and projections, and what would have been a nice, simple 2 million dollar project is now headed for 4 million dollars because management doesn't want it to take an extra three years, and you have to hire every hired gun available in the market, regardless of whether or not they have a felony record. Or maybe they wanted non-felons? That'll cost you extra, bub.
Again, if you think I'm exaggerating, you haven't been there.
But you're not one for those fancy-schmancy agile fads, no sir, you stay the course! And as one deadline slips into another, and the project managers start to change from irish coffee to Wild Turkey of a morning, the pressure mounts. 50 hours a week, 60 hours a week, why aren't you working on Sunday? Are you lazy? Do you want the project to fail? Where do you think you are, Google? No, sir, we're old school! Death marches are there to cull the weak! And now we waterfall down to the QA stage. And the bug reports start rolling, while (it's been years, folks) the technologies on which you bet the project start to EOL. You swear at the vendor, but they just shrug and point to their roadmap.
No matter, you soldier on, squashing bugs and praying that fresh ones won't manifest with every commit ... and then the users get to see it.
What the fuck is this? We didn't ask for this! We never wanted this! It doesn't do anything we care about, can we please, PLEASE go back to the old system? This sucks rotting zombiecock, the devs spent, what, five years producing this? My nephew in middle school could have shit better code over a weekend! The company spent five, no six million dollars on this? Why?
... if you think I'm exaggerating, oh MAN do I have bad news for you...
But, you know what? Never mind. Agile is evil, we can all agree on that. They hardly specify anything! How can you get quality from that?
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Tuesday July 02 2019, @01:03PM (1 child)
This is a great illustration of why engineering program management positions are something I avoid. Every PM I’ve ever worked with was held to a high degree of a accountability, but had absolutely no control over personnel or strategic decision making. When headcount becomes an issue, these guys are among the first to get the heave ho.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday July 02 2019, @02:12PM
This is a feature, not a bug. They can "interface" with middle management all day and act as a meat shield to absorb and deflect incoming away from the engineering department.
I know it seems bizarre to implement human labor to prevent management mistakes, it seems like it would be cheaper/simpler to get better management, but its the weird world we live in...
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday July 02 2019, @02:21PM (1 child)
You missed some aspects, like its "impossible" to coordinate 500 medium expensive developers so we'll pay them a severance bonus to train their 5000 replacements who will be utterly uncoordinated and non productive, then we'll hire like 50 super expensive local devs to rescue. I make a lot of money off that scheme.
Another hilarity is a shocking percentage of managers have no idea how to run a business. Consider... restaurant business, if the manager is a moron his idea of dumping a quarter pound of salt on every steak will pretty much be ignored in an overall high level sense by the system self correcting. But in precise technical software development, the morons rule more efficiently and if they want everyone to use edlin.com as an IDE, or use bubblesorts for all sorting, or use no version control, or use email for bug tracking, etc, those dumb ideas will be efficiently enforced to the detriment of the project. Other fields of business involve dumb managers having less control of micromanaged processes, so they're more successful than strongly controlled fields like software dev. If some moron in management at McDonalds could successfully enforce the exact muscle movements of flipping a pattie, then McD would be as much of an epic fail as any software project or airport or whatevs. What if the biggest moron of a MBA had total and utter control of the smallest tiny detail of every medical procedure, we'd be better off with going back to leeches in that case.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02 2019, @09:55PM
Yeah, it's impossible to cover all the immense fuckups that we can find within soylent's text limitations. The morons who disbelieve every word that Brooks ever wrote are just one aspect of it.
One recent challenge I faced was outright sabotage from devs who somehow thought that death marches would be preferable to Agile - presumably they were more excited about the devil they know, than the reverse. Managed to get them around by pointing out that management had a choice between two options (because of politics, long story) and the options were: Agile and (some approximation of) DevOps, or layoffs and contracting a firm of indian IT people who promised the impossible for a song and dance. Faced with the alternative, precisely none of them left the company, and all of them decided to embrace an Agile system.
Surprisingly, none of them broke legs or caught cooties from Agile. Instead, after a couple of months of learning the ropes, they actually started to produce. Outsourcing averted!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 01 2019, @08:55PM (9 children)
This is nothing new, people have screwed up big things literally forever. It's only recently that we've started to get it right most of the time, but it's all too easy to fall back to the baseline of human organizational performance which is somewhere between dismal and non-existent.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PartTimeZombie on Monday July 01 2019, @09:45PM (2 children)
This is true.
The customer is always wrong too:*
That is a recipe for disaster, and I suspect several German construction companies will have passed on the project when that sort of project management scheme became was proposed.
Also, changing the job during the actual build will have been when it became clear this job was doomed.
* OK, not always but if they don't listen to the people they are paying to do the job, run.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Dr Spin on Tuesday July 02 2019, @07:13AM (1 child)
The customer is always wrong too
Now you are even thinking like Google and Amazon
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday July 02 2019, @09:44PM
I was thinking like Google and Amazon because I had this conversation yesterday:
Me: Your wi-fi is not working because you have airplane mode turned on.
Customer: No I don't
Me; If you put your cursor over that Airplane icon there, what does it say?
Customer: Airplane mode.
Me: Yes, Airplane Mode. That tuns wi-fi off.
Customer: No it doesn't.
Me: ....
Sometimes the customer is wrong.
Sorry, I'm having a much better day today.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 02 2019, @04:01AM (5 children)
Welp, apparently, there is danger of reverting to the alleged baseline.
(Score: 3, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 02 2019, @12:37PM (4 children)
Not a theoretical danger, I (and everyone whose workplace is depicted daily by Scott Adams) live this every day:
BCS (Big Company Syndrome). The only reason that much concentrated stupidity, inefficiency and disorganization continues to exist is because of its overwhelming advantages in the marketplace. Kind of like the Woolly Mammoth before h. sapiens came along.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 02 2019, @01:04PM (3 children)
Here, it was the German government making bad choices without consequence.
The only reason such "concentrated stupidity, inefficiency and disorganization" exists is because of the absence of a market, not because it has some advantage in a market.
My view on this is that we've worked hard to eliminate the benefits of foresight, wisdom, and the usual organizational efficiencies from our lives, businesses, and institutions. Now, we're reaping the rewards.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 02 2019, @01:09PM (2 children)
Just like government jobs, I will say that there is a whole lot less stress and demands to perform in the bigger company jobs - mixed with bizarre nonsensical requirements and random blindsiding, but that also applies in the small scrappy companies.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 02 2019, @01:19PM (1 child)
We should think about why that is the case.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 02 2019, @06:05PM
Any big organization provides places to hide, I think it can be as simple as that.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 01 2019, @10:18PM (1 child)
Excuse me? Please name a specific time period which the world was not "accepting of all kinds of sub-standard tools and equipment."
Consider the "good old days" of the 1960, and a case example of the US National Freeway System [wikipedia.org].
Original timeline and cost: $25 billion, 10 years
Final cost: $114 billion (equivalent to $521 billion after adjusting for inflation), 36 years. Moreover, "some planned routes were canceled and several routes have stretches that do not fully conform with federal standards."
The not-so-secret-truth is that the whole world is held together with proverbial duct-tape and spit. If you actually know anything about any field of engineering (civil, electrical, computer, financial, political, etc.), you'll see everything from terrible to atrocious in most anything you look at.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02 2019, @05:38PM
Check out how Romans did their public projects and you see that there's a way. Some of those roads and other structures still exist.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 01 2019, @09:14PM (1 child)
Yeah, divide the job to a pile of independent contractors... that will increase reliability, right?
That increases communication problems and things fall through the cracks. Is this requirement Company A's responsibility or Company B's?
Rosy Scenario and her project management style strike again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02 2019, @02:31AM
But at least everybody can point a finger at somebody else when things get fucked up.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 01 2019, @09:42PM (3 children)
But, TFS specifically states that the goals and the plans changed as the contracts progressed. I agree with all the above comments condemning the Germans for having far too many independent contractors involved. But, even if there had been a super-contractor to bind them all - it's hell trying to hit a moving target when nobody knows where it's going.
Would you make hundreds of changes to your house, while hiring dozens of independent contractors, AFTER the architect had signed off on your plans?
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday July 01 2019, @09:48PM (1 child)
No I wouldn't, and neither would you. In most construction jobs those sorts of changes would mean re-pricing the job. I suppose the 30 or 40 small contractors were not confident enough to tell the client they were going to double the price of the job.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 01 2019, @10:40PM
Clearly you're not familiar with having the government as a client. We use this simple equation to manage our cost overruns:
Estimate^2 < Invoiced Amount
(Score: 5, Informative) by Username on Monday July 01 2019, @09:57PM
That is usually how construction goes. Hire a company to build it, they sub contract out the different jobs, excavators, builders, electricians, plumbers, etcetc. I believe this is especially true in germany where trade unions are very strong. They just decided to cut out the middle man and hire on the sub contractors directly. These guys do what they are told assuming you know what you're doing. They wont say, sorry this isn't in the blueprint and we would have to get it re-approved by the engineers and architects then send it onto the foreman and inspector to explain the changes to the workers. They will just do it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 01 2019, @09:43PM
Obviously it's the not money of the idiots who made the decisions, so screw you people, they got theirs.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 01 2019, @09:53PM (13 children)
So, Agile doesn't work for infrastructure projects then?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DECbot on Monday July 01 2019, @10:19PM
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)
"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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 01 2019, @11:06PM (2 children)
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)
The "true agile" argument is very close to the "true free market" one.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 02 2019, @01:24PM
(Score: 0, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02 2019, @12:43AM
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)
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
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.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Rich on Tuesday July 02 2019, @02:13AM (6 children)
There are too many "bullshit jobs". Too many people from top to bottom of socienty milking what's left of the substance for effortless money or power. There's been a recent Youtuber's ("Rezo") video causing a major stir, where he took apart the CDU and other government parties. Aside from the main topic, he had two disturbing clips of politicians, former SPD head Sigmar Gabriel and CDU secretary of drug policies Marlene Mortler. These two were so ludicrously clueless about core knowledge needed for their jobs, it has to be seen to be believed. If those responsible for the Berlin Airport would know ten times as much about as them about what's needed, the Airport would still fail.
Somewhat unrelated, but to give you an idea of how the paralysis works: We have, think of the children, obligatory smoke detectors now. Coming with them is an army of battery changers, in turn supervised by certification agents and their corporate overhead. I made the effort to look up the death toll caused by fires at the federal statistics service: It went down from about 380/a to 340/a over the last 10 years. Taking out the improvements from housing replacements and the fact that media is no longer consumed through devices with two-figure Kilovolts in a chipboard case, the gains look small. These devices trigger when properly frying a steak and I would assume that there are a good number of accidents when people climb on wiggly chairs trying to get the battery out to stop them wailing. Disinfecting telephones with the same effort would likely save more lives, disinfecting hospitals from multiresistant germs would for sure.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Tuesday July 02 2019, @03:48AM (4 children)
It is all about insurance, which is all about risk, wrapped up in actuarial tables.
Project managment is also all about risk managment, but mostly ends up being about cashflow and cost minimization.
If you can offset some risk, your premiums drop.
This can be as essy as engaging contractors, or out-sourcing certification..
Have you addressed, dealt with, mitigated or militated the risk?
No.
But you have saved money on those premiums.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02 2019, @06:34AM
Explain please, how you'd save money on premiums without at least mitigating the risk? Those numbers don't care whose dick got sucked. They care what the rate of incidence is, and the cost attached.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02 2019, @08:45AM (2 children)
Only a bit if at all, the insurers will take most/all of the savings.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Tuesday July 02 2019, @08:58AM
But the initial cost to the government was lower, and the contractors absorbed some of the risk and insurance costs.
Besides, when it eventually gets through several different courts and appeals, the extra billions don't seem to bring down governments, ministers, or even heads of departments.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 02 2019, @01:29PM
Then there wouldn't be incentives to reduce premiums because you couldn't reduce premiums. Initial premise of the thread becomes broken.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02 2019, @03:06PM
Yep. But you're not the one who gets to haul the burned corpse of a child out of the home and take them to the morgue, nor deal with the mother afterward. [whotv.com]