How Big Things Get Done

Published on: September 10, 2024

I just finished reading How Big Things Get Done by Dan Gardner and Bent Flyvbjerg. The lessons are not just for massive projects like nuclear reactors or space stations. IT projects are some of the most notoriously over-budget and late-delivered projects, so there's something there for the data corner of the world as well—and yes, data projects are not IT by default, but in practice, data will be grouped there.

"TAKE THE OUTSIDE VIEW. Your project is special, but unless you are doing what has literally never been done before—building a time machine, engineering a black hole—it is not unique; it is part of a larger class of projects."

Definitely true in Data Governance as well. There is always the argument that this particular business or business unit is unique: "we're different, we can't follow the normal process." It turns out that when you keep asking a couple of questions, most units are actually not that different. They all have some inputs, some processing, and some outputs, during which some data is generated, modified, and used. This can be governed; just find the right level of abstraction.

"ASK “WHY?” Asking why you’re doing your project will focus you on what matters—your ultimate purpose and result. This goes into the box on the right of your project chart. As the project sails into a storm of events and details, good leaders never lose sight of the ultimate result."

Always be able to explain what you're doing when talking to your stakeholders. This needs to be in your team's DNA. "Because it's the process" really isn’t the right answer 99% of the time. People generally want to cooperate, but they often (and in some cultures, always...) want to know why they are doing something. Getting to a state where you're actually able to explain yourself also forces you to nail down what you're really trying to achieve. If your target is unclear, so will be your explanation, and this will make you fail.

"BUILD WITH LEGO. Big is best built from small. Bake one small cake. Bake another. And another. Then stack them. Decoration aside, that’s all there really is to even the most towering wedding cake. As with wedding cakes, so with solar and wind farms, server farms, batteries, container shipping, pipelines, roads."

Loved this one, and not only because of the LEGO. It's so easy to lose yourself in magnificent vistas of achieving world peace through your new data governance policy, but you might just want to get started with a conversation with a disgruntled administrator who has a poor experience trying to get some data fixed.

There's a bunch more in this book, and so much of it is applicable to IT projects (one of the project types with the worst track record) and corporate projects in general that it's really worth the read. Agile lost its buzz a bit lately, but this book should be mandatory reading for anyone in an agile-related role.