Reflection on “Bigger Isn’t Always Better by Sarah Fister Gale, March 2011”

Going through the article “Bigger is not always better”, it was an eye-opening experience to read about all the urban infrastructure projects, and their total cost. It was also interesting to go through the top 20 mega projects in the world, knowing that three of those projects, with combined cost of 52 billion U.S.D, are in neighbor courtiers to Jordan.

As a result of the high cost and the extensive length of those projects, the managers face many threats on daily bases, such as budget cuts and market fluctuations, and these threats require more skills to deal with. Additionally, because of the long time span of the project, most of the mega projects go through economic crisis which have a major impact on schedule, funding, and resources.

Another challenge is represented in having many parties involved in many countries with different currencies, and those are continuously changing, and that affects everything, and sometimes it has catastrophic impact on some contractors, like the Asian crises in the late nighties, in addition to the strong value of the dollar that time, many contractors overseas found themselves out of business, like what happened to AMP (Aircraft Marine Products).

So as we can see now, in the mega projects, there are many technical considerations that many people do not think about, but the project manager should be aware of them. In order to achieve success in mega project execution, there should be strong leader with global experience, authority and charisma. Additionally, this strong leader should bring all of the stakeholders to the table to make sure that risk management covers all of their conflicting needs through a strong communication management plan.

Big is not always bad as well, because mega projects can get the firm mega profits. Most of the mega projects are being sponsored by governments, and that means the financing part is more reliable, as the government allocate cash before allocating contracts, which makes the budgets more secure.

Additionally, government gives authoritative power that cannot be obtained in private projects. On the other side, the profit of the public project is not easy to be measured, because most of the time it is not generating direct profits as in the projects of the private sector, and that make is mandatory to constantly communicate and educated the people about the benefits of this project to gain their support as they are considered to be the most important stakeholder in the public sector.

From the article as well as my own experience, I found that megaprojects do not stick to the original plan; the budget increases and scope changes, and schedules get pushed sometimes by years; however, the final success-measure is the customer’s satisfaction, so all that cannot be considered as failure as long as the customer is satisfied. In many projects, the budget and scope are not what controls how the project goes, but schedule on the other side is the main bottleneck in many projects, so we might find the designers working parallel with the construction and civil works, meaning that the construction begins before the final design gets approved.

Another aspect of the mega project is the green building trend and the sustainability that have to be taken into consideration from the very beginning of the project, starting with the design phase. All of that makes it even more challenging for the project leaders, and that is why they got to have the confidence to stand up for what they truly believe is the best solution in that particular issue.

Going back to one of the projects that I worked on, king Abdul-Aziz international airport in Jeddah in kingdom of Saudi Arabia 2011, that project had an ending date of November 2013, but the design itself, took almost 18 months to be done, without getting the approval from the consultant.

The construction work started before the approval, and all of that was under the responsibility of the main contractor, because they were pushing the schedule as much as they could, so when the project was completed in 2014, the consultant started working on the approval process of the design; they didn’t stick to the schedule, and the budget also increased by almost 23%, and the scope of our work kept increasing, because other subcontractors failed to do their work. With all of that the final customer, or the project sponsor, the Saudi government was glad with the results, and we were rewarded another contract.

In mega projects, it is crucial to have the international knowledge, which comes from the international exposuer, and there is no place for mistakes in such projects, as one mistake could get you out of the business in such projects, so it is very important to know the right project size that your company can handle, and it is also important as a main contractor to choose your subcontractors wisely, because if the boat goes down, you are going down with it, especially if the safety were compromised to reduce costs, like what happened in 2013 in Bangladesh, in the Savar building collapse.