Delivery & Controls
The stage with the most reporting and the least clarity.
Delivery is the most heavily instrumented part of the lifecycle. There are schedules, cost reports, risk registers, change logs, dashboards and steering committees. There is more information here than at any other stage, and it is frequently the stage where organisations are most surprised.
The reason is that project reporting measures conformance to a plan, not the health of the thing being produced. A programme can be green on every metric and still be accumulating problems that will not surface until it is operated.
Flyvbjerg’s dataset is the uncomfortable backdrop: nine in ten megaprojects exceed budget, the pattern holds across 104 countries and six continents, and it has not improved over the ninety years for which comparable records exist. Whatever is failing is structural, not local.
What typically goes wrong
- 01
Progress is reported against a baseline that everyone privately knows is obsolete.
- 02
Change is managed as a commercial event rather than as information about the design.
- 03
Entitlement is accumulated rather than resolved, so a dispute is quietly manufactured during delivery and argued about years later.
- 04
Risk registers list risks without anybody owning the decision each risk implies.
- 05
Assurance is scheduled to arrive after the decisions it should have informed.
Questions worth asking
- ?
What would have to be true for this report to be wrong?
- ?
Which changes have altered how the asset will be operated, not just what it costs?
- ?
Are we tracking the production of information, or only the production of works?
- ?
What do the people doing the work believe that the reports do not say?
The seam that follows
Between delivery and handover, accountability transfers — and the party holding the knowledge stops being obliged to share it.