How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration

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Bent Flyvbjerg is BT professor and chair of major programme management at Saïd Business School. Read more of Bent's blogs here: ' Tokyo 2020: what the postponed Olympics can teach us about crisis response', and 'Why we need ‘smart scale-up’ to deliver cities of the future' For anybody who's doing a project, first sit down and ask yourself: why are you doing the project? You need to have a very good answer to that question before you start so that you actually know precisely what the reasons are. Then, after you know that, you can start,” he says.

There is an excellent section on using the cost of similar projects to get a base rate cost and also to see what proportion of similar projects go over budget by and how much they go over budget by. If a project can be delivered in a modular manner, enabling learning along the way, it is likely to succeed. Having researched the properties of planning errors, I am confident that nobody has studied the topic more broadly and deeply than Bent Flyvbjerg. His focus ranges from the Olympic Games to the renovation of your doghouse.” We’ve all seen big infrastructure projects like a new railway line, Olympic stadium or even home renovations. We have all seen them, they are estimated to cost X and they end up costing 2X, 5X or even 10X. So why is this?For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. In total, only 8.5 percent of projects hit the mark on both cost and time. And a minuscule 0.5 percent nail cost, time, and benefits. Or to put that another way, 91.5 percent of projects go over budget, over schedule, or both And 99.5 percent of projects go over budget, over schedule, under benefits, or some combination of these. So, you're starting a big new project and wondering where to begin. Well, before you do so, consider this question: what's your Lego? It's the question that the world's most successful project leaders always ask themselves before embarking on something big. Important, timely, instructive and entertaining’ – Daniel Kahneman, bestselling author of Thinking, Fast and Slow

How Big Things Get Done is a book that every legislator, city council member and corporate executive ought to read.” The book How Big Things get done – The surprising factors behind every success project, from home renovations to space exploration” by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner is a book about, as it says in the title, big projects.

Understanding what distinguishes the triumphs from the failures has been the life’s work of Oxford professor Bent Flyvbjerg, dubbed “the world’s leading megaproject expert.” In How Big Things Get Done, he and Dan Gardner identify the errors in judgment and decision-making that lead projects, both big and small, to fail, and the research-based principles that will make you succeed with yours. No spoilers here for anyone who follows Professor Flyvbjerg's work, his main argument is for a data focused approach to projects using similar shaped projects as a basis for planning, and a repeatable modular approach to design rather than building huge one offs. This book is a neat and easily readable presentation of that thesis with easily understood examples. Hopefully it will feature in the bedside reading of policy makers and ultimately lead to a wider acceptance of the ideas within. But it's much more than that. There are a good number of entertaining best and worse case examples to draw from, illustrating the cognitive biases, nasty surprises and misplaced hubris that high-flying project directors have faced, with everything from the Sydney Opera house to Terminal 5 of Heathrow making a guest appearance. The secrets to successfully planning and delivering ambitious, complex projects on any scale—from home renovation to space exploration—by the world's leading expert on megaprojects. Understanding what distinguishes the triumphs from the failures has been the life’s work of Oxford professor Bent Flyvbjerg. In How Big Things Get Done, he identifies the errors that lead projects to fail, and the research-based principles that will make yours succeed:

Nothing is more inspiring than a big vision that becomes a triumphant, new reality. Think of how the Empire State Building went from a sketch to the jewel of New York’s skyline in twenty-one months, or how Apple’s iPod went from a project with a single employee to a product launch in eleven months. Flyvbjerg’s study of big construction projects worldwide has led him to formulate the iron law of megaprojects: over budget, over time, under benefits, over and over again. His deep understanding of why big projects fail—and occasionally succeed—makes this book a truly fascinating read.” —Gerd Gigerenzer, author of Gut Feelings Over-budget and over-schedule is an inevitability. Incompetence and grift is outrageous. Bent Flyvbjerg, with this terrific data-driven book, has shown that there is another way.” The variety of case studies from the Sydney Opera House to Pixar Studios make for an engaging and highly readable book and provide fine examples to support the arguments presented for How Big Things Get Done. An example of a house restoration project gone awry brings the thesis to a human level (although not exactly relatable, the renovation goes over budget by the price of about five average houses in the UK). This book is important, timely, instructive, and entertaining. What more could you ask for?”—Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize–winning author of Thinking, Fast and SlowThe secrets to successfully planning and delivering projects on any scale—from home renovation to space exploration—by the world’s leading expert on megaprojects. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. It’s crazy, but the average practice in project management is a disaster, and good practice is an outlier,” says Flyvbjerg. But in new research included in his book, he documents which type of projects perform well and which don’t. He found that the best-performing projects are renewable energy projects, like wind and solar – and the reason for this is their modularity, he explains. Flyvbjerg explains that successful projects always have a team who clearly understand what their purpose is, and then throughout the delivery phase, always keep one eye on how what they are doing will help deliver this.