minus 1 week

Tyrone Pitsis delivered his inaugural lecture, talking about speeding up a collaborative project by using the alliance model.  The case study was of the alliance that was formed to fix the sewage system in Sydney ahead of the Olympics.  Trust and openness and moving people along to other projects if they were resistant to this model of working.  Clear immovable goal.  All decision making judged against the project goal.  No blame culture – Kan ban posters that focus solutions not scape goats.  No lawsuits.  25 page contract as opposed to the usual 300 page contract.  And still no lawsuits.

This is truly inspiring and makes me want to go out and change the way we work, change the world.  Again.

I have seen that contracts are not worth anything if the person doing the work is dishonest or unwilling or simply uunable to do the work, but for the rest of us they are a means of formally laying down responsibilities where we want them laid out, for agreeing the purpose of the project

Besides the many personal examples of complex projects and how it was the relationships that were where the solutions were found, I was wondering about the following.

Big public projects are budgeted on quotes given and everyone on the inside knows that the quotes are going in low… and expect the actual cost to be higher.  No insider is surprised at budget over-runs.  Also I suppose then that the honest supplier i.e. who comes in with a higher (more correct) quote, will not actually get the job.  OK.  So everyone quotes low.  The project then “comes in over budget” and the managers outside of the process or the people asking for the work to be done (politicians?) are whacked, they take the stick for the awful job they have done and told they are incompetent.

What if one retrospectively analyses public projects over under and on budget and applies the measures – the kpi’s – that the olympics case study used – and see how the projects fared.  I am certain that many of them will do just fine on more than one measure (just… not budget or lawsuits or maybe time) and it occurs to me that these measures can give us all good news among the bad.  I mean… as a member of the public, using the new City Library in Newcastle (reopened in 2009 after a 3 year rebuild) I am affected by how fit for purpose the building is and the services delivered there… not whether the project ran under or over budget or any of those measures.