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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 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!