Network Rail has got it in the neck for over-running engineering works at Rugby and Liverpool Street Station which have created misery for people going back to work this week.

My point about all this is, what do the people in charge not understand about the meaning of the word deadline?!

I find this a lot in project management, the concept of flexible deadlines. While PM’s talk a lot about delivering on-time in fact most projects are set up with delivering “all the products / features” as the only priority. They are not helped by project management tools such as Microsoft Project where it is almost impossible to completely fix a deadline or flex the features / products that need to be delivered.

If you want to deliver to a deadline then you have to be prepared to flex what you deliver according to business priorities. Some of these priorities have to be “should haves” rather than “must haves” otherwise any problem such as lack of resource will result in missing the deadline.

I don’t have an inside track on what went on here, but it looks like the project was doomed before it started; too much to do in too short a time. The contractors, particularly Bechtel, must have known before they started that there was a high risk of not hitting the deadline, given their whinging about not being able to get enough engineers. Clearly they have not managed their stakeholders very well, given that Network Rail and the Train companies are saying that they did not know about the delays until just beforehand.

I just hope that their lawyers are better than their project managers! Actually no, as a taxpayer I’d rather the fines that the ORR will level on Network Rail get passed onto Bechtel. Somehow I think that it won’t as the public sector is not good at passing risk onto the private, even though that is what outsourcing is supposed to be all about! (This is the subject of another white paper I’m thinking about)