Photographic evidence of sustainability

 

...or rather the lack thereof...

In this post we present to the PM Community the first known revealing photographs of actual examples of projects in 'various states of success'. In our upcoming book, Sustainability in Projects, Programs, and Portfolios: Realizing Enterprise Benefits and Goals, we talk a lot about success and what it means from a a project perspective.

In particular we look at Project Management Success versus Project Success.  In other words, the “efficiency” of how the project works compared to the “effectiveness” of the project’s product, in the longer term.

The graphic below shows the three elements: PM Success on the horizontal, Project Success (the product’s success) and Endurance as a third element/dimension (shown as depth on the chart).

So now on to the photographic evidence.

Let’s first look at a photo of a project that went very well.  The Sony Betamax was released on time, and within budget, and did exactly what the designers and marketeers at Sony wanted it to do.  At least for the sake of this discussion, we’ll say that it did.  But what happened to the Betamax itself?

If you’re younger than us (not too hard) you may want to hear the story.  We provide it to you courtesy of The Engineer Guy:

"This mighty machine sparked a revolution in our use of media. It’s a Sony Betamax video cassette recorder from 1979. This monster weighs about 36 pounds. The engineer in me find it fascinating: there is nothing digital, it’s a truly analog machine -- all moving pieces and parts.

Early adopters of the Betamax used it to record television shows -- a revolutionary concept at the time -- because prior to the Betamax you had to watch a show when it was broadcast. It threaten the entertainment industry so much that in 1979 they argued that recording television shows at home infringed on their copyright. It all came to a head in a Supreme Court case -- Sony Corporation of America versus Universal City Studios -- where five justices allowed home recording. Although Sony won this court battle, they ultimately lost out to a machine that used this size tape. This is a VHS recorder made by Sony’s great rival JVC.

Both machines solved the same problem: How to store information compactly on a tape. Here’s the brilliant innovation used by both machines. The machine grabs the tape, drags it forward, as this silver drum starts to spin rapidly. The drum has two electromagnets (called heads) arranged on opposite sides of the drum that read the magnetic information on the tape. That rotating head allowed for a compact recorder: in many previous recorders the magnetic heads didn’t move, only the tape. Because there was a limit to how fast the tape could move, it took a lot of tape -- about a seven inch reel to record an hour, which means that a movie would need two 7-inch reels inside a cassette. So, the rotating heads dramatically reduced the amount of tape needed, reducing the size to where it could be easily held in a cassette.

So, if the machines are so similar why did Betamax lose to JVC? Many thought the betamax machine would win: It had the better image quality and the Betamax is decidedly better built. Compare ejecting a tape on the Betamax to the VHS. First, watch the Betamax. Note how smooth it is. And then watch the VHS. That’s abrupt and will wear out the mechanism. Yet, to my engineer’s eye the VHS was the better solution.

First, the VHS was lighter than the Betamax: 29 and a half lbs compared to 36 lbs for the this Betamax machine. That’s a huge difference for a mass manufactured object. It impacts everything from material costs to assembly time to shipping costs. So, at the low end of the market the VHS machines were cheaper than Sony’s Betamax.

Second, the earliest Betamax tapes played for only one hour, VHS played for 2 hours -- enough time for a movie. The ultimate killer, though, was the rental market.

While, Betamax focused in its ads and energies on time shifting -- their ads featured headlines like “Watch whatever, whenever” -- while JVC, the maker of the VHS system, created relationships with the nascent video rental industry. When this market grew, VHS dominated in titles. While you could for a while find both formats eventually retailers began giving shelf space to the slightly more dominant brand, which then dominated even more.

So, the Betamax versus VHS dispels the notion that simply being first to market is the most important issue. It reminds us that technical excellence in one area isn’t enough -- here the superior picture quality of Betamax -- but that all technical aspects matter. For any mass manufactured object, the winner is usually the one that is just good enough."

Now, let’s go diagonally to the opposite side of our matrix – a project which itself is considered a failure but its product – at least in the long term – is considered a success.  Representing this corner is the Sydney Opera House.

Some of its project attributes, from this article in the Australian newspaper The Courier-Mail:

In 1957, the Danish architect Jorn Utzon won a NSW government competition to design a public building for a prized piece of harbour land at the time employed as a tram shed.

Utzon's concept was little more than a sketch when then premier Joseph Cahill, facing electoral defeat after more than two decades of Labor power, hastily decided to begin construction within two years.

Budgeted at an initial cost of $7 million, the Opera House ended up costing more than $100 million and took more than a decade to construct. That cost blowout, of 1400 per cent, makes Sydney's Opera House the most expensive cost blowout in the history of megaprojects.

And yet:

“....the Opera House adds $775 million to the Australian economy every year in direct ticket sales, retail and food spending and by boost to tourism to Australia.

The Opera House is (one of the most) most distinctive (icons in the world), attracting tourists from all over the world.”

Finally let’s go to the southwest corner of our matrix, where we have a project which is considered by many to have had poor project management efficiency and also has a product with enduring issues.

Boston’s  “Big Dig”

We won’t go into lots of detail here because the story of the Big Dig is fairly well known (refer to the Wikipedia entry for a good review).  The project was over budget by many billions of dollars and very late ($2.6B versus $14.6B and many years behind schedule).  That's of course bad enough. No, here, our focus is on the continued problems the project’s product has had.  This includes the death of a driver as a result of a concrete ceiling panel.  Here, we provide the 'revealing photo' as evidence that the project's product continues to have problems.  What you are looking at is a set of lighting fixtures.  The black bands that you see indicated by the arrows are straps which are holding up the lights because the project’s design failed to take into account the galvanic corrosiveness of the environment (and its long-term effects). Galvanic corrosion is an electrochemical process resulting in oxidation or corrosion of two dissimilar metals in contact in the presence of an electrolyte.  This takes place over time.  Projects are handed over in a moment of time.  The project manager has to get their team to think past – way past – that handover! 

In this case, the repair cost over $54 million – and the installation of 25,000 support straps like the ones in our actual photo- and caused frequent and disruptive lane closures.  The final deliverable of the project was ‘eased traffic’.  You can see that aside from the project efficiency – the things we’re used to measuring like schedule and budget and immediate product delivery, this project also continues to have problems with effectiveness: the project’s product and what it offers stakeholders in the steady state.  Here’s a story from a local news station, including a video that shows the issue.

We do not yet have a photo of the elusive northeast corner – here is where a project is run efficiently and it yields a product which works in the long term.  We know they're out there.  And we know there are a lot of smartphones...equipped with really good cameras... often on project sites...

Perhaps you have one?  Send in your photos!