Any readers in Madrid?
I try my best to hide it but a few people know, in an alternative life I could have been a very happy train spotter. Perhaps its just an engineer’s hardware fetish, but it isn’t the actual trains themselves, its more the systems around railways which fascinate me – perhaps thats why I said yes to the poison chalice that was Railtrack all those years ago.
Anyway, this means I follow a few transport bloggers. One of them through up the really interesting piece on How Madrid built its Metro Cheaply.
One reason this piece really resonates with me is I know clients who are obsessed with not spending money, or rather: there is unlimited time and money for governance, assurance, stage-gates and all the paperwork, but money for actual work is restricted by all those costly processes.
Once again see the Dustin Hoffman, Laurence Oliver story in playing out.
But back to Madrid. If you read the piece you find that Madrid built the metro cheaply not but using some new fangled technology to dig the tunnels, not by forcing suppliers down to minimal price or replacing humans with AI robots.
No, most of the cost savings were on the way the work was set up, what you might call “management side”. So, time to delivery was prioritised over cost and, so work could happen rapidly planing and environmental processes were changed, and communities included in discussion. The solution was not to get rid of management; the solution was to change management approach and priorities with management as part of the solution – this is reminisent of Fred Brooks.
Rather than seeing each metro line as a project on its own – with its own set-up, shutdown, management and engineering teams – there were seen as a continuous series. This allowed teams, and learning, to flow from one to another.
In other words, rather than project-project-project, it is continuous engineering. Another example is rail electrification programme. The UK sets up each electrification efforts as a unique project while Germany runs a rolling programme. Germany electrifies nearly 10 times as much track a year as the UK.
Even when Madrid did make changes to the engineering work they were management driven to reduce costs and accelerate delivery, e.g. the use of standardised designs and existing technology.
Although we are talking about a very physical metro project here many of these ideas flow across to technology, software, systems.
The challenge we face today is rarely “Can we build it?”
Today the experience and technology exists, whether building metros and software system. You might as well assume you can build it, the technology is there.
The challenges we face are: can we build it in time? in a cost-effective manor?
Rising costs and time might be seen as the second version of Parkinson’s Law: “the number of workers within public administration, bureaucracy or officialdom tends to grow, regardless of the amount of work to be done.”
More than the technology it is the administration which is the constraint.
Yet, looking at the engineering to reduce time and money may be the wrong place to look – especially when quality is cut. Instead, there is a need to engineer the environment – the management processes and approaches, the rules, regulations and funding – around the work to allow it to proceed rapidly and cheaply.
However, cutting management time – all that administration, governance, reviews, “are you building the right thing?” – entails some risk. Spending money to remove the risk slows it down and increases the price. Proof again of an economic definition “profit is the return on risk.” Eliminate all the risk and you eliminate all the profit, or in these cases, benefit.
(Madrid metro image taken from Wikichttps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Madrid_Metro_Map.svgommons by Javitomad under CCL license.)
