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The Tyranny of ‘The Plan' (2013)

chrisgagne.com

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Re: The Tyranny of ‘The Plan' (2013)

#41

Post by seventhtiger »

cs702 wrote: post #2

I found the OP very insightful, and would recommend reading and thinking about it. The lessons we can draw from the construction of The Empire State and other buildings of that era, before the advent of computers, are applicable to any large, capital-intensive project. My only reservation is that the OP fails to mention that some workers died during the construction of The Empire State building: According to the buil…

That casualties number for the Qatar WC does not present an accurate picture. That number of deaths is the total number of expat deaths during the period of construction. It's not just workers in stadium construction.

"Overall, 15,021 non-Qataris died in the country between 2010 and 2019, according to the government. A Guardian analysis in February 2021 found that more than 6,500 migrant workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka had died in Qatar since the award of the tournament. The death records were not categorised by occupation or place of work."

It's a normal number considering Qatar's 3 million population is 90% expats.

Re: The Tyranny of ‘The Plan' (2013)

#42

Post by majormajor »

One of the most interesting things to me here re: the common question "why can't we build quickly anymore":

"They didn’t have design loopbacks because they had extremely experienced builders. The builders knew what they were doing. They had been building skyscrapers for between 30 and 40 years and they understood what they had to pay attention to and what was possible and what had to be designed in what order to eliminate the loopback. Now, all the computers in the world: they’re not going to substitute for deep experience. I propose that if they didn’t know what they were doing there’s no way: they would not have had the chance to hit that kind of number."

How many cities out there today have as many builders building skyscrapers at the same pace as they were then? Is there a way to get that speed back without the same sort of practice?

---

The workflow/independent stuff is also very interesting, but similar to the above question, it's tough to draw exact parallels to software. We've all seen big waterfall projects fail, and the "design floors on the fly independently" aspect has a lot of similarities with rapid iteration, etc, but software is somewhat different in that the labor and the design are the same - there isn't a "steel team" and a "concrete team" etc that can work completely independently, I don't think.

"Create the schedule and then figure out the project" is probably a super useful takeaway, though.

Re: The Tyranny of ‘The Plan' (2013)

#43

Post by gpcz »

majormajor wrote: post #17
yamtaddle wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one here would want to finish a project faster if the cost would be measured in human lives. People—including some here—choose risk to life for greater productivity, all the time. Every advocate of going back to the office, in places without excellent public transit or walkability, is proposing to trade some serious micromorts for extra productivity (driving's dangerous).

I think there's a pretty clear line in many places in today's western world about the difference between "directly causing death" and "causes fractional death." So comparing "directly dying from construction" to "commuting in a car" is a big reach. Diet, stress, physically-taxing-if-not-directly-fatal jobs, cancer-linked chemicals, pollution, etc. Tradeoffs made at both the societal and individual level every day. Ev…

All death is "fractional" if you make a fraction out of it. For example, dividing the number of people that died making the Empire State Building by the total number of workers. It seems subjective which fractions matter and which don't. It seems to be based on how much the responsibility can be laundered.

Re: The Tyranny of ‘The Plan' (2013)

#44

Post by imgabe »

cs702 wrote: post #2

I found the OP very insightful, and would recommend reading and thinking about it. The lessons we can draw from the construction of The Empire State and other buildings of that era, before the advent of computers, are applicable to any large, capital-intensive project. My only reservation is that the OP fails to mention that some workers died during the construction of The Empire State building: According to the buil…

The assumption here is that the speed caused the deaths and that’s not necessarily true. We have better safety practices now like hi-vis vests, tie-offs, etc. They don’t slow things that much. I think we could build just as fast without deaths with modern materials and machines.

Re: The Tyranny of ‘The Plan' (2013)

#45

Post by clairity »

aidenn0 wrote: post #40
clairity wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's subtle, but "plan" (material resource planning, MRP) is essentially waterfall in this context, where you design first, then do work breakdown into a waterfall schedule. it suffers from cascading delays because of the bullwhip effect (among other things). it's project oriented (a 1-off, 1-time event). in contrast, "workflow" is akin to kanban in this context. you start with constraints (in this case time and mone…

Lack of a plan is what results in bullwhip effect; the bullwhip effect is caused by each silo iterating on its local knowledge... > in contrast, "workflow" is akin to kanban in this context. you start with constraints (in this case time and money) and then design the system to those constraints. mary, the speaker, mentions that they had 4 different, decoupled workflows, which helped them avoid those pesky cascading d…

no, the bullwhip effect is caused by uncertainty across coupled tasks along the critical path, no matter the level of detail of your plan. it's a statistical phenomenon that you can mitigate with other measures, like critical chain. the empire state building example shows that they reduced coupling by creating 4 separate, independent workflows, mitigating the bullwhip effect by roughly a factor of 4.

Re: The Tyranny of ‘The Plan' (2013)

#46

Post by slotrans »

majormajor wrote: post #42

One of the most interesting things to me here re: the common question "why can't we build quickly anymore": "They didn’t have design loopbacks because they had extremely experienced builders. The builders knew what they were doing. They had been building skyscrapers for between 30 and 40 years and they understood what they had to pay attention to and what was possible and what had to be designed in what order to elim…

> Is there a way to get that speed back without the same sort of practice?

No.

Practice is the ONLY way to get good at anything. Doesn't matter what it is.

Re: The Tyranny of ‘The Plan' (2013)

#47

Post by kragen »

cs702 wrote: post #2

I found the OP very insightful, and would recommend reading and thinking about it. The lessons we can draw from the construction of The Empire State and other buildings of that era, before the advent of computers, are applicable to any large, capital-intensive project. My only reservation is that the OP fails to mention that some workers died during the construction of The Empire State building: According to the buil…

14 deaths out of ≈3500 workers over 18 months is a death rate of 270 per 100_000 per year, or a life expectancy of 380 years

this is about ten times the average death rate for young people today but it still doesn't seem like an unacceptably dangerous workplace environment in the sense that if you worked in an environment that dangerous all your working life you'd still make it to retirement age with about 90% probability

that's a similar level of risk to smoking cigarettes, but of course you can't make a living smoking cigarettes, so i think skyscraper construction is somewhat more morally defensible

we aren't talking about the mines of potosí or something here

Re: The Tyranny of ‘The Plan' (2013)

#48

Post by kragen »

majormajor wrote: post #17
yamtaddle wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one here would want to finish a project faster if the cost would be measured in human lives. People—including some here—choose risk to life for greater productivity, all the time. Every advocate of going back to the office, in places without excellent public transit or walkability, is proposing to trade some serious micromorts for extra productivity (driving's dangerous).

I think there's a pretty clear line in many places in today's western world about the difference between "directly causing death" and "causes fractional death." So comparing "directly dying from construction" to "commuting in a car" is a big reach. Diet, stress, physically-taxing-if-not-directly-fatal jobs, cancer-linked chemicals, pollution, etc. Tradeoffs made at both the societal and individual level every day. Ev…

i don't understand why you think directly dying from having a steel i-beam fall on you is so different from directly dying from having a toyota hilux t-bone you in your civic, but you say it's 'a big reach'

aren't these both random 'accidents that could've happened to anyone'

do you maybe think that the foreman on a construction site sometimes picks one of the employees and orders him to get killed that day or something

Re: The Tyranny of ‘The Plan' (2013)

#49

Post by xkcd-sucks »

majormajor wrote: post #42

One of the most interesting things to me here re: the common question "why can't we build quickly anymore": "They didn’t have design loopbacks because they had extremely experienced builders. The builders knew what they were doing. They had been building skyscrapers for between 30 and 40 years and they understood what they had to pay attention to and what was possible and what had to be designed in what order to elim…

Anecdotally, my elderly father was an Architect for quite a long time - He claims the trend was (1) away from skilled labor and (2) towards contractors building only what is made explicit in drawings. I.e. details would be specified as "typical - see an example (only it's unusual)" and rely on the the best judgment of the contractor/labor to implement, while now work halts if there is any ambiguity. He thinks the old practce led to higher quality buildings more quickly, while the new practice is an inevitable consequence of legalism (everybody sues everybody when anything goes wrong) but more a consequence of less expert labor.

Re: The Tyranny of ‘The Plan' (2013)

#50

Post by aidenn0 »

clairity wrote: post #45
aidenn0 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lack of a plan is what results in bullwhip effect; the bullwhip effect is caused by each silo iterating on its local knowledge... > in contrast, "workflow" is akin to kanban in this context. you start with constraints (in this case time and money) and then design the system to those constraints. mary, the speaker, mentions that they had 4 different, decoupled workflows, which helped them avoid those pesky cascading d…

no, the bullwhip effect is caused by uncertainty across coupled tasks along the critical path, no matter the level of detail of your plan. it's a statistical phenomenon that you can mitigate with other measures, like critical chain. the empire state building example shows that they reduced coupling by creating 4 separate, independent workflows, mitigating the bullwhip effect by roughly a factor of 4.

Yes, the bullwhip effect is caused by uncertainty across coupled tasks. A plan that doesn't reduce and manage uncertainty is bad. Not having a plan means there is uncertainty even when all of the information is there to determine the answer. The empire state building had a plan for obtaining steel from foundries at the velocity they needed.

If one defines plan to mean "We schedule everything up front and then stick our fingers in our ears and say 'la la la la' when reality conflicts with our imagined schedule" then of course plans are bad. Similarly if one were to define agile as "a system that is incapable of delivering any feature that takes more than 2-4 weeks to develop" then agile would be bad too.

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