10 Rules to Remember When Building a City: Project Management Edition
Things They Forgot To Tell Me in Business School
 
And by building a city I mean planning, designing, and constructing, not in a sociological or metaphorical sense. If one is fortunate enough to spend time in and around megaprojects in the form of “master-planned” cities in the GCC region, patterns of thinking and decision making emerge - gains made, bullets dodged, pitfalls avoided - or not, all kinds of things best remembered the next time. To the visitor, a number of these will seem incongruous for an undertaking of enormous cost and sophistication, but if it appears on this list it means I have run into it on multiple occasions, as will have others. There is plenty for everybody here, particularly project executives at the front-end tasked with taking the vision through master planning, design, development planning, and into early construction.
 
1.  Look Before Leaping: Work through the big questions first.
Once signed on to a project existential questions are out, but the rest is fair game. What are we trying to do (beneath the headlines)? How will it be done? Who will do it? Do we have the necessary means and capabilities? What must happen first for this to move forward? What are the environmental/ social/ economic constraints? What do we hope/expect to gain from it? It is not that these questions are not asked, substantial resources are deployed in project planning and due diligence, it is how they are asked and the context in which they are asked. As the initial decisions to proceed are most often ambitious and uncompromising, those of us situated below can become too intent on building post facto justifications, making statements when we should be finding answers to the difficult questions.
 
2.  Do Not Be Seduced By The BIG Announcement: Excessive exaggeration is not a victimless crime, it is a self-inflicted injury.
Nothing undermines credibility like overpromising and underdelivering repeatedly. Resist the temptation to throw a grab bag of superlative, hip, buzz words at the wall to see what sticks. The scale of the endeavor can still be fabulous when the “hype meter” is dialed back to 8 and not “turned up to 11”. And if we are unable to control the message arc, we can avoid believing the farthest-flung parts of it - inhaling our own exhaust can prove fatal.
 
3.  Accept That There Is No Silver Bullet: Do not overburden the project with expectations of driving reform.
Expectation management is key, as is keeping the project from becoming a “poster child” for progress and a vehicle for leapfrogging over many deep-seated economic, social, institutional or regulatory shortcomings. Projects can be excellent catalysts for change if used in a focused way, but they cannot be wielded like a magic wand in all directions to wish away a collection of profound problems.
 
4.  Prioritize Innovation: Pick a limited number of targets for innovation recognizing that not everything can be special.
Following up on the previous, innovation’s Siamese twin is disruption. Disruption is risk, and risk must be managed very tightly. For example, do not make irreversible investment decisions relying on a “cutting edge IoT [Internet of Things] enabled integrated infrastructure and building management strategy as a way to limit energy consumption and cut back drastically on hard infrastructure requirements” if we are currently unable to uniformly enforce even simple building efficiency measures such as maximum U-values, low flow faucets, and energy-efficient appliances. Aim for targets that can be hit.
 
5.   Avoid ‘Best-Practice’ Distractions: The only best practices that matter are those that work for us.
Context is everything. It is critical to understand global trends and the state of the art, but overly ambitious, poorly crafted, mandates based on other people’s success are among the most common weaknesses in the conceptual stages of these projects. As these ideas are what set the mold for everything to come, the hangover will last more than a lifetime.
 
6.   Make Phasing Our Friend: If, in the harsh light of day, the full mandate is unachievable,  scale Phase One to fit and leave the dreams for tomorrow.
Promise as large as we must in out-years, but be as realistic as we can in early ones, designing each phase to succeed autonomously. Success with a smaller phase will work out far better than failure with a large one.
 
7.  Be Prepared For The World’s Longest Roller Coaster Ride: This is a marathon, not a sprint.
Pacing is critical as these are multi-generational, non-linear activities. They tend to start with high ambitions and a mad flurry of activity, but can quickly lose steam as external realities intrude, bottoming out then rallying, often repeatedly, in classic “too big to fail” style via restructurings and cash injections. If we step in during year ten, a project can easily be entering its third iteration, having vaporized enormous amounts of money and only partially attaining its goals but never stopping.
 
8.  Pick Horses For Courses: If we want to build a city, find people that understand cities.
Real estate and infrastructure are to the physical city as trees are to a forest. During the conceptual and planning stages, we will need people from many disciplines, all of whom must have an understanding and appreciation of the dynamics of urban development. Later, other skills will dominate but at the start, it is important to have strong urbanists.
 
9.  Contract Success: Balanced contracts lead to superior results at the best price.
Contracts have huge impacts on the nature and quality of the work produced. At the front-end of a project where we require creativity, exploration, thought, and iteration, it is important to balance positive and negative inducements to promote this. Too often an overly rigid contract from an approximately related discipline governs the creative process. A good analogy is trying to design a modern racing bicycle by following the detailed instructions and checklist for an old steam engine. Yes they are both modes of transport, and yes they both have wheels, but using one to build the other is not recommended. This mismatch between type work and type of contract is among the most common and least appreciated obstructions in projects of this type.
 
10.  Draw All Lines Before Coloring: Time and money “saved” by fast-tracking at the outset is most often lost, with interest, when faults and corner cuts appear.
When a high-profile project starts, people are impatient to see progress on the ground. One of the most popular ways to compress a project schedule during “soft” planning and design stages is to pile sequential activities vertically, or worse yet to start constructing before even completing the detailed planning. Simple, and capable of significantly shortening project durations on paper, doing this introduces major, avoidable, project risks while also undermining the alignment of the parties involved. It is important to find a formula to provide the “quick wins” while allowing time for the project development stages to unfold appropriately.
 
Conclusion: Building a new city is not easy and statistics tell us that, like all new businesses, the odds of achieving notable success out of the gate are slim, but we can tilt the playing field toward success by keeping these ten rules in mind.