The Tyranny of ‘The Plan' (2013)
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The Tyranny of ‘The Plan' (2013)
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Re: The Tyranny of ‘The Plan' (2013)
#2I 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 builder, "only" 5 workers died, but according to a newspaper, 14 workers died.[a] No one in the developed world would want to finish a project faster and for less money if the cost has to be measured in human lives -- expect in extreme circumstances, like war.[b]
See also: https://patrickcollison.com/fast .
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[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_State_Building#Construc...
[b] In some parts of the world, projects are routinely finished faster at the expense of human lives. For example, according to https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/nov/27/qatar-death... , between 6,500 and 15,000 workers died, and more were injured, to build all the stadiums and facilities in time for the World Cup in Qatar, a tiny country in the Middle East / Western Asia with a total population of under 3M people.
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EDITS: Added " -- expect in extreme circumstances, like war" to the last paragraph, and a link to Patrick Collison's fantastic page with examples of "people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together" and thoughts on why projects take so much longer today.
Re: The Tyranny of ‘The Plan' (2013)
#3I'm not really understanding the distinction between a "plan" and a "workflow". It sounds like they had a plan but we are bending over backwards in TFA to call it something else because a plan is bad in some agile circles.
Re: The Tyranny of ‘The Plan' (2013)
#4I 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…
BLS says that roughly 5000 people die in construction accidents annually. those deaths are certainly tragic, but not disproportional.
Re: The Tyranny of ‘The Plan' (2013)
#5I 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…
> 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).
Re: The Tyranny of ‘The Plan' (2013)
#6I 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…
> No one in the developed world would want to finish a project faster and for less money if the cost had to be measured in human lives.
Depends. I think the Manhattan Project killed more people (not including using the bombs in combat).
Re: The Tyranny of ‘The Plan' (2013)
#7I loved this, and in particular how to think about teams, experts, and workstreams. But the physical construction (in my experience) has a limited number of software analogs. I wrote about this a long time ago:
We have a problem. People can't get from one area of town to a neighboring area because there is a river in between and no road. So let's build a bridge.
[Long discussion of how to plan to build a bridge in the real world]
Now, let's do it in software.
We're going to start by focusing on the problem to solve: get people from A to B. With software, the solution isn't necessarily as obvious as it is in the physical world. Maybe we need a bridge. But maybe we need a ferry. Or a helicopter service. Or maybe we should just move the two pieces of land closer together. Or freeze the river.
Customers speak in terms of solutions: I want a bridge. I want a bigger kitchen. But with software we know to be wary of this: unlike the physical world, the users of software often do not have a good intuitive understanding of what's possible. So while they speak in terms of functionality and solutions, it's our job to root out the real problem and come up with an appropriate solution - which we might also not have a good intuitive understanding of.
Re: The Tyranny of ‘The Plan' (2013)
#8I'm not really understanding the distinction between a "plan" and a "workflow". It sounds like they had a plan but we are bending over backwards in TFA to call it something else because a plan is bad in some agile circles.
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 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 delays. workflows are process oriented (repeatable events), so steel construction, for example, was thought of as an separate repeatable (if varying) process (swimlanes, in kanban parlance) as they went up in height. kanban also focuses on realtime learning and adjustments as well as just-in-time inventory systems (important to steel being delivered on time, like using 2 different suppliers to make sure there were no delays).
this is the stuff you learn in operations class in business school (or some engineering programs), as did chris (the author of the article/blog), who went to ucla anderson.
Re: The Tyranny of ‘The Plan' (2013)
#9I 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…
I strongly suspect that the excellent planning behind Empire State led to less deaths than equivalent towers from that time.
Re: The Tyranny of ‘The Plan' (2013)
#10I 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…
> No one in the developed world would want to finish a project faster and for less money if the cost had to be measured in human lives. Depends. I think the Manhattan Project killed more people (not including using the bombs in combat).
Possibly including John von Neumann, one of the greatest polymaths ever. Everyday life now would be different if he had lived to a normal life expectancy instead of dying to aggressive cancer at 53.