The PMI 2024 Pulse of the Profession has introduced a framework for categorizing projects based on the management approach being used of: Predictive – Hybrid – Agile. If generally adopted, this framework will at long last kill of the notion of waterfall as a project delivery methodology.
As shown in our historical research The History of Agile, Lean, and Allied Concepts, the idea of waterfall as a project delivery methodology was a mistake, and its value as a software development approach was limited.
The PMI framework has some problems but the predictive project delivery paradigm is described as focused on schedule, scope, and budget. The projects tend to use a phase-based approach and are plan driven. This describes most hard projects and many soft projects that are not using an unconstrained agile approach.
The best governed organizations will have ethical failures, even criminal activities, occurring from time to time. When an organization employs 1000s of people there will always be some who make mistakes or choose to do the wrong thing. The difference between a well governed organization with a strong ethical framework and the others is how they deal with the issues.
The Bad
Over the last few months there has been a lot of commentary on major ethical failures by some of the ‘big 4’ accountancy firms (see: The major news story everyone missed: KPMG hit with record fine for their role in the Carillion Collapse). With a common theme being attempts by the partners running these organizations to minimize their responsibility and deflect blame. As a consequence, there have been record fines imposed on KPMG and massive long-term reputational damage caused to PWC by the Australian Tax Office scandal.
The Good
The contrast with the way the Jacobs Group (Australia) Pty Ltd (Jacobs Group) has managed an equally damaging occurrence could not be starker! Jacobs Group had pleaded guilty to three counts of conspiring to cause bribes to be offered to foreign public officials, contrary to provisions of the Criminal Code Act 1995 (Cth). But, the exemplary way this issue has been managed is an example for all.
Offering bribes to foreign public officials has been a criminal offence in Australia since 1995, and the Crimes Legislation Amendment (Combatting Foreign Bribery) Bill 2023 has just passed into law significantly increasing penalties.
Despite this, between 2000 and 2012, SKM was involved in two conspiracies in the Philippines and Vietnam. Both conspiracies involved employees of SKM’s overseas development assistance businesses (the SODA business unit) paying bribes to foreign public officials in order to facilitate the awarding of public infrastructure project contracts to SKM. SKM employees embarked on a complex scheme to conceal the bribes by making payments to third party companies, and receiving fake invoices for services which were not in fact rendered. The conduct was known to and approved by senior persons at SKM, although concealed from the company more widely.
Jacobs Group acquired SKM in 2013, after the conduct had ceased. During the vendor due diligence processes, the conduct came to the attention of persons outside those involved in the offending, and the company’s external lawyers.
Despite the lawyers findings being subject to legal privilege, and the very remote possibility of the Australian Authorities discovering the crime, the non-conflicted directors unanimously voted to self-report the findings to the Australian Federal Police (AFP), to waive legal privilege in the draft report, and to make it available to the AFP. The company also reported the findings of its investigation to a number of other authorities, including the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, AusAid, and ASIC.
The company and a number of individuals were charged in 2018, and Jacobs pleaded guilty to three counts of conspiring to cause bribes to be offered to foreign public officials. The matter only came to our attention because of a recent High Court ruling dealing with technical issues around the calculation of the fine to be paid by Jacobs.
When Justice Adamson in the New South Wales Supreme Court sentenced the company on 9 June 2021. She found that while each of the offences committed fell within the mid-range of objective seriousness for an offence, this was mitigated by the fact that the company had self-reported the offending to authorities, and that the self-reporting was motivated by remorse and contrition rather than fear of discovery. The sentencing judge also found that the conduct was not widespread, and effectively limited to the SODA business unit. She accepted evidence from the AFP that it was unlikely to have become aware of the conduct absent the company’s self-reporting, and that the company’s post offence conduct was “best practice” and “of the highest quality”.
Based on these findings the amount of the fine to be paid by Jacobs is likely to be in the region of $3 million – a massive discount from the potential maximum that, based on the High Court decision, is likely to exceed $32 million.
Lessons on Governance and Ethics
The approach taken by Jacobs Group, following the identification of potential criminal conduct, is a useful guide as to how an ethical organization works:
The prompt retention of independent external lawyers to investigate suspected instances of criminal misconduct.
The decisions of the board of directors to self-report the conduct to authorities and provide ongoing assistance and cooperation to law enforcement and prosecutorial authorities, notwithstanding the risk of criminal sanction.
Committing to remediation steps to address the conduct (and seeking to prevent any repeat of it), including by overhauling relevant policies and procedures and making appropriate operational changes including:
suspending and then terminating relevant individual employees who had participated in the conduct;
operational changes to management and oversight of the SODA business unit that had been involved in the conduct, and changing approval processes for all payments by that unit;
introducing a new Code of Conduct which explicitly prohibited the offering of inducements to public officials;
introducing a requirement for the completion of a bribery and corruption risk assessment before committing to new projects;
upgrading various internal policies, including the company’s whistleblower, donations and gifts and entertainment policies. It also introduced new policies which discouraged the use of agents, and required the screening of all new suppliers and sub-consultants for bribery and corruption risk. The company also engaged an independent monitor to review the changes made to its policies;
updating and expanding existing bribery and corruption training programs for staff; and
modifying internal audit practices to more closely scrutinize non-financial risks, such as bribery and corruption.
One definition of ethical behaviour is doing the right thing when no one is looking. The contrast between Jacobs and KPMG’s outcomes is a lesson worth remembering.
Hidden in the pre-Christmas holiday fun, the ABC[1] published an ‘investigations exclusive’ by Linton Besser and defence correspondent Andrew Greene[2] that needs more attention.
It appears project ICT2284 (One Defence Data), a $515 million project to unify and exploit the data resources held by the Department of Defence is in trouble due to Hastie (pun intended) decisions made before the last election. Within this overall project, a $100 million One Defence Data “systems integrator” contract was awarded to KPMG Australia Technologies Solutions on the eve of the last federal election, and the then assistant minister for defence, Andrew Hastie, announced KPMG’s contract, promising it would “deliver secure and resilient information systems”.
This award was made after KPMG had been paid $93 million Between 2016 and 2022, for consulting work on a range of strategic advice, which included the development of ICT2284 and its failed forerunner, known as Enterprise Information Management, or EIM.
Unsurprisingly, the review by Anchoram Consulting highlighted both governance and procedural issues including:
The project has been plagued by a “lack of accountability” and conflicts of interest.
The documents suggest there is profound confusion inside Defence about who is in charge and what is actually being delivered.
Core governance documents have not been signed off and key requirements of KPMG’s contract have been diluted from “mandatory” to “desirable”, sometimes in consultation with KPMG itself.
The project had been “retrospectively” designed to justify a $100 million contract that was issued to KPMG Australia Technologies Solutions, or KTech, exposing the department to “significant risk”.
The heart of ICT2284’s problem appears to be the project’s fundamental design work had “not been done due to … the rush to meet deadlines tied to the Cabinet submission and related procurement activities”, with “no understood and agreed, desired end-state”.
Predictably both the area of Defence running the project, known as CIOG, or the Chief Information Officer Group, and KPMG reject the report findings.
From a governance perspective the biggest on-going issue appears to be the lack of capability within CIOG and government generally to manage this type of complex project. The downsizing and deskilling of the public service has been on-going for decades (under both parties). This means the outsourcing of policy development to the big consultancies is inevitable, and their advice will be unavoidably biased towards benefitting them.
The actions by the current government to reverse this trend are admirable but will take years to be effective. In the meantime, we watch.
The two fundamental questions standard agile metrics cannot answer consistently are:
1. How far ahead or behind schedule are we currently?
2. When are we expected to finish?
Most of the tools and techniques used to manage Agile projects are good at defining the work (done, in-progress, or not started) and can indicate if the work is ahead or behind a nominated planned rate of production, but there is no direct calculation of the time the work is currently ahead or behind the required production rate, or what this is likely to mean for the completion of the project. A full discussion of this topic is in Calculating Completion. However, most project sponsors and clients need to know when the project they are funding will actually finish, they have other people that need to make use of the project’s outputs to achieve their objectives. At present all Agile can offer is an educated assessment based on the project teams understanding of the work.
Work Performance Management (WPM) has been designed to solve this challenge by providing answers to these questions based on consistent, repeatable, and defensible calculations.
WPM is a simple, practical tool that uses project metrics that are already being used for other purposes within the project, to assess progress and calculate a predicted completion date by comparing the amount of work achieved at a point in time with the amount of work needed to have been achieved. Based on this data WPM calculates the project status and the expected completion date assuming the rate of progress remains constant.
The publication of BS 202002:2023 – Applying benefits management on portfolios, programmes and projects, last year has prompted an update to our Value and Benefits Realization page, including a link to the new Standard’s home page.
As we know, organizations invest resources in projects to derive benefits and create value. But those benefits don’t happen by themselves, they need to be managed. BS 202002:2023 is a new British standard on how to deliver the planned benefits of projects, programmes and portfolios to create value for the organization and its customers.
While the Standard is quite expensive to buy, all of the publications on the Mosaic ‘Value and Benefits’ page are free to download and use and cover: – Value and Benefits Overview, – Defining project success, – Benefits Management, – Value Management and Value Engineering, and – Useful External Web-links & Resources.
Project controls are facing a dilemma, on one hand there is a strong push to make projects agile and adaptive, on the other the need for on time delivery, organisational reporting requirements, and the law of contracts require precision and certainty from project control systems. For a wide range of projects, traditional critical path scheduling (CPM) is no longer fit for purpose, a new controls paradigm is needed.
CPM is based on scientific management concepts. It assumes there is one best way to undertake the work of a project, management know what this is, and their intentions can be modelled in a CPM schedule. While the CPM paradigm remains true for many projects, experience shows there are also many where this assumption is simply not correct including both soft and distributed projects. In this type of project, there is an ongoing level of flexibility in the sequencing of work that can be exploited to the benefit of the project and the client. However, most of the available management tools such as burndown charts, Kanban boards, sprint planning, last planner, etc., are specific to a methodology, focus on optimising work in the short term, and lack a rigorous predictive capability.
This presentation define the characteristics of projects that are not suited to CPM, including agile, adaptive, and distributed projects, and describe an approach for managing this type of project based on agile and lean, while recognising there are likely to be some mandatory sequences that must be followed. WPM offers a rigorous framework for identifying progress and predicting the project completion date based on the quantity of work achieved compared to the quantity planned to be accomplished.
This presentation is part of an ongoing project focused on identifying the challenges, and opportunities created by adapting an improved management approach to control agile, adaptive, and distributed projects focused on optimising resource productivity.
In 2018 the Carillion group of companies were bankrupt owing £1.5 Billion ($2.9 billion Australian), at the time, the largest bankruptcy ever in the UK. The latest news is in October 2023, KPMG was fined a record £21 million (AU$40 million) for a ‘textbook failure’ in its audits of Carillion. This long running saga raises questions of ethics both within KPMG and the Carillion Board, and controls. Did the Board and Auditors not know (a management failure), or was it a case of not wanting to know the true situation (a governance failure)?
A wider question for another time is the way the ‘big four’ accounting firms operate. String together Arthur Andersen and Enron in the USA (2001), KPMG and Carillion in the UK (2018), and PWC and the Australian Tax office (2022) suggests there are major structural issues with the ‘big four’ partnership model.
The Carillion Story
Carillion was created in July 1999, following a demerger from Tarmac Ltd., which had been founded in 1903. Following the demerger, Tarmac focused on its core heavy building materials business, while Carillion included the former Tarmac Construction contracting business and the Tarmac Professional Services group of businesses (I worked for Tarmac Construction in 1971/72 – it was a great company in those days).
As an independent company, Carillion undertook a series of acquisitions and expansions including:
2001, expansion into the facilities management services sector
2001, acquired the 51% of GT Rail Maintenance it did not already own
2002, bought Citex Management Services
2005, acquired Planned Maintenance Group
2006, Mowlem support services business
2008, Alfred McAlpine
2008, Vanbots Construction in Canada
2011, Eaga, an energy efficiency business rationalised later in the same year
2012, 49% interest in The Bouchier Group, providing services in the Athabasca oil sands area
2013, the facilities management business of John Laing
2014, 60% stake in Rokstad Power Corporation, Canada
2015, Outland Group, a specialist supplier of camps and catering at remote locations in Canada
2022, Ask Real Estate, a Manchester-based developer
All of these acquisitions came at a cost, in March 2015 concerns about Carillion’s debt situation were raised and by October 2015, Carillion had become hedge funds’ most popular share to ‘sell short’ as analysts questioned the lack of growth and rising debt; the company’s share price fell 19% over the same period.
On 10 July 2017, a Carillion trading update highlighted a £845 million impairment charge in its construction services division, mainly relating to three loss-making UK PFI[1] projects and costs arising from Middle East projects. These and other write downs together exceeding £1 billion occurred only a few months after KPMG had given an unqualified audit opinion on the correctness of Carillion’s accounts.
However, despite these problems, in the five-and-half-year period from January 2012 to June 2017, Carillion had paid out £333 million more in dividends than it had generated in cash from its operations. But, net cash from operations was also needed to pay for investments, and interests on debt (Carillion’s interest charge was £30 million in 2016).
The Carillion Collapse
At the time of its implosion in January 2018, Carillion employed 43,000 people in defence, education, healthcare, transportation and construction and service activities. It had around 420 contracts with the British public sector and many other commercial contracts in the UK and overseas.
Reporting at the time highlighted the aggressive growth strategy, a complex internal management structure, a fuzzy governance structure, poor supervision of daily activities, and the loss of control on some of its flagship projects.
Carillion had liabilities of £7 billion and just £29 million in cash when it went into liquidation. The primary cause of the Carillion collapse is undoubtedly the actions of its directors and managers and there are ongoing court actions against these people. However, the role of an auditor, is to provide an independent assessment of the organisation’s accounts, to identify the types of issue that lead to the collapse of Carillion and provide either assurance, or warnings to both shareholders and creditors.
The KPMG Involvement
KPMG were the auditors for Carillion, their involvement in this saga was finalised a couple of weeks ago when Britain’s accounting regulator, the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), fined KPMG a record £21 million (AU$40 million) for a ‘textbook failure’ in its auditing of the Carillion accounts. The FRC said the number, range, and seriousness of the deficiencies in the audits of Carillion including not challenging Carillion management, and a loss of objectivity were exceptional, which meant that Carillion was not subject to rigorous, comprehensive, and reliable audits in the three years leading up to its demise. The FRC fine would have been £30 million, but was discounted due to admissions and co-operation by the auditor.
In addition to this fine KPMG and its partners have received the following penalties:
KPMG was ordered to pay £5.3 million in costs
The lead auditor for 2014 to 2017 was fined £250,000 and banned for 10 years after a discount to reflect his cooperation and admission of failures.
The lead auditor for 2013 was handed a £70,000 penalty
Three other auditors were respectively; banned for eight years and fined £45,000, banned for seven years and fined £30,000 and banned for eight years and fined £40,000
KPMG was also fined £14.4 million in 2022 after providing false and misleading information to the FRC during spot checks on its audits of Carillion and another UK company
In February, KPMG paid an undisclosed sum to settle a separate £1.3 billion legal claim by the company’s liquidators, who claimed the auditor had missed ‘red flags’ resulting in the group’s accounts being misstated.
The FRC found that KPMG had failed to respond to numerous indicators that Carillion’s core operations were lossmaking and that it was reliant on short term and unsustainable measures to support its cash flows. The Carillion case is the 16th since 2018 in which the FRC or an industry tribunal has imposed sanctions against KPMG. It takes the total penalties and costs levied against the firm in that time to more than £95 million — far more than its rivals.
Conclusions
The lack of press coverage of this saga in Australia at least can be attributed to the coverage of first the referendum, then the war in the Israil, plus the years of investigation and multiple trials since the Carillion collapse in 2018. The still largely unanswered questions include:
Can large organisations really be that bad at controlling major projects? My answer is yes – look at London’s Crossrail project[2], HS2, and a long list of other projects.
A more focused controls question is are the controls failure on this type of project a question of not knowing, or not wanting to know? My answer is in Carillion’s case, the Directors did not want to know! Other situations are likely to vary[3].
Who is responsible for the controls and reporting failures? My answer is the governing body. It is the Board of Directors who set the standards required from management and you do not get good controls without a significant investment[4].
What about the Auditors? My answer is both governments and corporations need to seriously rethink the way they engage with the ‘big four’, and the ‘big four’ need to be completely restructured – the ‘partner model’ has clearly failed.
For the last 13 years I’ve been part of the team developing delivering the Project Governance and Controls Symposium in Canberra. In a couple of weeks’ time from the 22nd to 24th August, we will be celebrating the 10th Anniversary symposium at the Canberra Rex Hotel, for more on this see: https://www.pgcsymposium.org.au/
The concept of linking project controls and governance may have been seen as something unusual a decade ago, but as an article in this month’s Australian Institute of Company Directors magazine, the topic is (or should be) of significant interest to both senior managers and directors. In every organization there are a number of projects that are central to the organization’s ability to respond to change, and deliver its strategy. These projects affect the performance of the organization and therefore the performance of the project has legal implications for the organization and its directors and officers. There have been successful prosecutions of numerous organizations that failed to manage project issues effectively.
Director’s responsibilities
Each director has a core responsibility to be involved in the management of the company and to take all reasonable steps to be in a position to guide and monitor management[1]. This requires information, and under the Corporations Act, the director can rely on information provided by the company’s officers and employees, provided the director has reasonable grounds to believe they are reliable and competent people, and the director has made an independent assessment of the information. The legislation also includes a positive due diligence obligation in respect to a number of key business activities including financial reporting, OH&S, and the management of ‘mission-critical risks’.
This means where a project or program has been established to deliver a critical capability the directors need to be across the project and understand its status and predicted outcomes. This of course need information!
Management’s responsibilities
While directors have been subject to legally imposed obligations for decades, management has largely been able to avoid legal liability. This is changing and the legal obligations of company officers and employees who provide information to the board are steadily increasing. The law requires information provided to the board to be complete and accurate.
The Officers of the company will typically include most members of the ‘C-suite’ and may extend to other senior management roles. As an officer, each person is subject to a general statutory duty of care and diligence that applies to all aspects of their role including briefing the board[2].
This was extended in 2019 when the Corporations Act was amended by the Treasury Laws Amendment (Strengthening Corporate and Financial Sector Penalties) Act to create new civil penalties for both corporate officers and employees who mislead the board by providing incorrect information, or by omitting information. This applies to any employee who ‘makes available or gives information, or authorizes or permits the making available or giving of information’ to a director that relates to company affairs. This provision applies to information in any form, all that is required is for the information to be materially misleading, which includes ‘half-truths’. If the information has been provided without the person taking reasonable steps to ensure that the information is not misleading, they have contravened section 1309 (12) of the Act.
The reasonable steps include the person being able to show they made all reasonable enquiries under the circumstances and having done so believed the information was reliable, accurate, and not misleading. If these duties are breached ASIC can run civil penalty proceedings against the individuals concerned without having to show they knew the information was materially misleading or intended to mislead.
What this means for project controls
Within an organization where the delivery of the benefits, or capabilities, created by projects is a core part of the organizations business strategy, information on changes in the expected delivery date and/or cost to complete important projects is likely to be seen as information that is material to the affairs of the company with a particular focus on its continuous disclosure obligations. Failure to comply with the Corporations Act has consequences for the company[3]. But where the directors were acting reasonably on the information provided to them, liability may well flow down to the officers and employees who provided inaccurate, or incomplete information to the board.
The solution is simple, set up governance and controls systems that provide ACCURATE information[4].
But achieving this is not easy, success requires the right culture, management support, and capable staff. However, even with these factors in place providing correct information is not easy. One of the major challenges is predicting the likely completion date for both ‘Agile’ and ‘distributed’ projects where traditional CPM simply does not work! And without knowing the overall timeframe, any cost predictions are questionable. Using EVM and ES is of course one solution that’s ideal for larger projects; a simpler, more pragmatic option for most normal projects is to use WPM to calculate the current status and projected end date. For more on WPM see: https://mosaicprojects.com.au/PMKI-SCH-041.php#WPM
This is just a brief overview, there are two ways to find out more:
[1] See the ‘Centro case’: ASIC -v- Healey [2011] FCA 717.
[2] In ASIC -v- Lindberg [2012] VSC 322, the former CEO of the Australian Wheat Board admitted to failing to inform the board of key issues.
[3] In 2006 Veterinary pharmaceuticals company Chemeq Ltd paid a $500,000 fine, in part for failing to keep the market informed of cost overruns and delays on a project to construct its manufacturing facility [Re Chemeq [2006] FCA 936].
One of the speakers at PGCS 2023 is Alex Walsh, his presentation Managing wicked program delivery looks at the UK nuclear program to decommission the Sellafield complex, one of the most complex high hazard nuclear facilities in the world that was operating from the 1940s through to 2022. For more on this presentation and the PGCS program see: https://www.pgcsymposium.org.au/.
As part of my work on preparing the PGCS program, I had a virtual look at this project and came across this fascinating risk mitigation story where the courage of two managers probably saved hundreds of lives in the North of England.
The site
Sellafield, formerly known as Windscale, is a large multi-function nuclear site close to Seascale on the coast of Cumbria, in NW England. As of August 2022, primary activities are nuclear waste processing and storage and nuclear decommissioning. Former activities included plutonium production for nuclear weapons, nuclear power generation from 1956 to 2003, and nuclear fuel reprocessing from 1952 to 2022.
After the war ended, the Special Relationship between Britain and the United States “became very much less special”. The British government saw this as a resurgence of United States isolationism which raised the possibility that Britain might have to fight an aggressor alone. It also feared that Britain might lose its great power status, and therefore its influence in world affairs, so in July 1946, the Chiefs of Staff Committee recommended that Britain acquire nuclear weapons.
Two reactors (called ‘piles’ at the time) were constructed to enrich uranium to create plutonium and other isotopes. The designers of these reactors desired a passively safe cooling system. In place of water, they used air cooling driven by convection through a 400-foot (120 m) tall chimney, which could create enough airflow to cool the reactor under normal operating conditions. The chimney was arranged so it pulled air through the channels in the reactor core, and huge fans were positioned in front of the core, to greatly increase the airflow rate.
The risk
During construction, physicist Terence Price considered the possibility of a fuel cartridge splitting open, causing the hot uranium to catch fire, resulting in fine uranium oxide dust being blown up the chimney and escaping into the environment.
Raising the issue at a meeting, he suggested filters be added to the chimneys, but his concerns were dismissed as too difficult and too expensive to deal with. However, Sir John Cockcroft, leading the project team, was sufficiently alarmed to order the filters.
They could not be installed at the base as construction of the chimneys had already begun, and were constructed on the ground then winched into position at the top once the chimneys were complete. They became known as Cockcroft’s Folly as many regarded the delay they caused and their great expense to be a needless waste.
This all changed after the Windscale fire of 10th October 1957. This fire was the worst nuclear accident in the United Kingdom’s history, and one of the worst in the world. The fire was in Unit 1 of the two-pile Windscale site and burned for three days releasing radioactive fallout which spread across the UK and the rest of Europe[1].
But, the filters trapped about 95% of the radioactive dust and arguably saved much of northern England from becoming a nuclear wasteland. With typical British understatement, Terence Price said “the word folly did not seem appropriate after the accident“.
The UK government under Harold Macmillan ordered original reports into the fire to be heavily censored and information about the incident to be kept largely secret. It later came to light that small but significant amounts of the highly dangerous radioactive isotope polonium-210 were released during the fire. But the presence of the chimney scrubbers at Windscale was credited with minimising the radioactive content of the smoke.
Both the ‘piles’ were shut down after the fire, but a large quantity of radioactive materials are still inside the sealed #1 pile; this is one of the challenges for the decommissioning program Alex will be speaking about at PGCS in a couple of weeks’ time.
More relevant to this post though is the moral courage exhibited by Sir John Cockcroft in doing the right thing rather than the easy thing to guard against an accident that ‘could not happen’, but did! Thinking through this dilemma puts a whole new perspective on risk assessment and mitigation – in the right circumstances ‘black swans’ can kill.
Canal construction is an interesting branch of both engineering and project management:
From the engineering perspective, planning a route that works (water flows in the right direction at the right speed), retaining the water within the canal, and overcoming natural obstacles indicates the need for a degree of design sophistication.
From a management perspective organising the 100s, or 1000s of people needed for the work and ensuring the work is done correctly is a significant exercise in organisation, logistics and control. As with most early projects, there’s scant information on how this was accomplished, but the results are self-evident.
Canals have been excavated and used for drainage and irrigation for thousands of years. But for most of this time, the use of canals was restricted to relatively flat areas with good water supply. It was the advances in technology in the Middle Ages that allowed canals and navigations to overcome the problem of hills, resulting in canals becoming a major form of transport. The First Canals is the final paper in a series looking at early transport projects.
The full set of papers in this series are:
The First Canals. This article looks at the early development of canals across the world from 4000 BCE through to the European medieval canal revival between the 12th and 16th centuries.
Early Canals, The Evolution of the Technology. Canals have been excavated for drainage and irrigation for thousands of years and once built, the larger of the canals were undoubtedly used for trade. However, for several thousand years canals were restricted to areas where the land was relatively flat. This article looks at the development of the technologies that allowed canals to traverse hills and valleys.
Early Canal Projects in the UK. Until the introduction of efficient steam-powered railways, canals were the driving force behind the industrial revolution in Britain. This paper looks at the development of canals in the UK from Roman times through to the start of the ‘canal mania’ in the 1790s, and seek to identify where possible the contractual and management processes used in their construction.
Cost Overruns on Early Canal & Railway Projects. The difficulties in determining a realistic cost for a new class of project are understandable. But, transport projects in the United Kingdom (UK) predate the industrial revolution by several centuries. This suggests that in addition to the lack of empirical cost information, the problem with the cost estimates identified in The Origins and History of Cost Engineering may have been caused by various combinations of poor governance, questionable ethics, and optimism bias. The same set of issues that continue to plague many modern mega-projects.
Pat Weaver
Lynda Bourne
Aavssitedev's Blog