3 ms·

> You’d think if the future depended on it, build times could be reduced. Possibly not! We have gotten worse at building large things. One interesting explanat

> You’d think if the future depended on it, build times could be reduced. Possibly not! We have gotten worse at building large things. One interesting explanation comes via Poppendieck's "Tyrrany of the Plan": https://chrisgagne.com/1255/mary-poppendiecks-the-tyranny-of-the-plan/ https://chrisgagne.com/1255/mary-poppendiecks-the-tyranny-of... Her prime example here is the Empire State Building, which was built on time and on budget even though they had not finished designing it when they started building. The basic notion is that contrary to the current paradigm, more planning does not necessarily make things better. On my own account I'd add that the rise of The Plan corresponds to a rise in a managerial caste (driven in part by the invention and rise of MBAs) that took power from people with domain-specific expertise. Much of that managerial work relates to developing, maintaining, and enforcing The Plan. But this is so much the dominant paradigm that it's hard for many to even imagine alternatives. A good book here is Spender & Locke's "Confronting Managerialism": https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Economic-Controversies-ebook/dp/B09LQSSM77/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=confronting+managerialism&qid=1671207692&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Ec... So it may be that even if the future depended on it, build times could not be reduced because it's paradigmatically impossible. For basically the same reason that a lot of large software projects are clusterfucks: the POSIWID-type purpose of many organizations is not the work they're supposed to be doing, but protecting and benefiting the people supervising the work.

peteradio 4y ago
I think largely I agree but I'm personally sensitive to too much disparagement of having a plan at all. I doubt the empire footers were dug and poured prior to a plan. The important part is knowing when phase 1 can be executed and then phase 2 until the last phase so that all the layers are in the correct order. If you have incompetent planners or perhaps even people with disincentive to complete then you wind up digging out the electrical after the walls are finished.
notahacker 4y ago
I suspect that having up to 3000 people per day working for a pittance in the middle of a global financial crisis was a larger factor in getting the Empire State Building built on time and budget than lack of planning or middle management... Either way, I'm not sure Depression-era construction approaches are really what we want for nuclear plants.
dv_dt 4y ago
This could just mean that the ESB had a budget and schedule w/ sufficient margin. The rise of more managed planning meant that everything is pre-optimized and all margins are slashed - the planning process as it is operated in the modern day is generally all about getting to minimized commitments.
- wpietri 4y ago
  It could mean that. After reading the article, would you like to make that claim?
eightysixfour 4y ago
I think there’s another thing driving “The Plan,” which is that each party involved is trying to race to the local maximum of efficiency. We need the plan to be finished so that the whole building can be value engineered to reduce waste (material, labor, whatever). If you plan the whole building and know the exact forces it is going to encounter in different conditions, you can then spec the exact amount and type of materials you need, which means those have to be created to more exacting standards and there is less tolerance for deviation from The Plan. There is an environment component to this in that we shouldn’t be intentionally wasteful, but trying to engineer in too much precision seems less efficient when you zoom out for anything that is not mass manufactured.
- wpietri 4y ago
  I agree, but think it's even worse. I think the key local maxima being pursued are the personal interests of managers. Long ago I worked on a project for a financial company. The exec in charge, known to us as The Hammer, had made big promises to poobahs higher up. So for no real-world reason, his employees worked death-march hours to have everything done by the arbitrarily chosen date. As the year's end approached, it was obvious that there were big problems in performance and quality, with a lot of bugs in place and absurd operational requirements. (If I recall rightly, it was so over-complicated a single in-house release took a conference call with more than a dozen people going over a checklist of more than 40 steps.) Did The Hammer pause the work, do some root cause analysis, and improve the situation? Of course not. He demanded everybody work even more hours and ignore anything but the highest priority issues. And so the project limped across the finish line at the last minute, with an enormous backlog of cleanup to do before they could add a single new feature. The team was exhausted. And after the celebratory lunch the next week, they were also demoralized, as they all got The Hammer's hearty congratulations and $50 gift cards. But none of that mattered, because The Hammer's bosses got positive status reports with everything in the green. He was then quickly promoted to a more impressive position in a different area, meaning that the code base he had created, which resembled a pile of manure covered with Christmas paper, was now the problem of some other sucker. I'm sure it eventually had to be rebuilt, providing another hero story for another ladder climber. If I had to guess, the amount of waste on that project was north of $5 million. But by The Hammer's measure and that of his bosses, it was a great success, because they either didn't know or didn't care about the waste.
lamontcg 4y ago
> a rise in a managerial caste That's the problem right there. Pro-nuclear people like to scream about the hippies putting up too many barriers to nuclear plants. Really it is just all the same middle-managers and dynamics at the jobs that they work at everyday. Everyone is willing to spend another few million dollars and a few weeks of delay, which only increases the fiefdom they control, to mitigate some risk and diffuse any possible blame to the rest of the committee. But that also means that we're not going to ever build like China unless our management culture fundamentally changes.
8note 4y ago
An alternative is that nuclear pushback got better in that same time period, and is now more able to cause delays. The same applies with building construction - the governance process have evolved to check for more things with more ability to say no and delay, but without being able to say no(or what needs to change) more quickly

peteradio 4y ago

I think largely I agree but I'm personally sensitive to too much disparagement of having a plan at all. I doubt the empire footers were dug and poured prior to a plan. The important part is knowing when phase 1 can be executed and then phase 2 until the last phase so that all the layers are in the correct order. If you have incompetent planners or perhaps even people with disincentive to complete then you wind up digging out the electrical after the walls are finished.

notahacker 4y ago

I suspect that having up to 3000 people per day working for a pittance in the middle of a global financial crisis was a larger factor in getting the Empire State Building built on time and budget than lack of planning or middle management... Either way, I'm not sure Depression-era construction approaches are really what we want for nuclear plants.

dv_dt 4y ago

This could just mean that the ESB had a budget and schedule w/ sufficient margin. The rise of more managed planning meant that everything is pre-optimized and all margins are slashed - the planning process as it is operated in the modern day is generally all about getting to minimized commitments.

wpietri 4y ago
It could mean that. After reading the article, would you like to make that claim?

eightysixfour 4y ago

I think there’s another thing driving “The Plan,” which is that each party involved is trying to race to the local maximum of efficiency. We need the plan to be finished so that the whole building can be value engineered to reduce waste (material, labor, whatever). If you plan the whole building and know the exact forces it is going to encounter in different conditions, you can then spec the exact amount and type of materials you need, which means those have to be created to more exacting standards and there is less tolerance for deviation from The Plan. There is an environment component to this in that we shouldn’t be intentionally wasteful, but trying to engineer in too much precision seems less efficient when you zoom out for anything that is not mass manufactured.

wpietri 4y ago
I agree, but think it's even worse. I think the key local maxima being pursued are the personal interests of managers. Long ago I worked on a project for a financial company. The exec in charge, known to us as The Hammer, had made big promises to poobahs higher up. So for no real-world reason, his employees worked death-march hours to have everything done by the arbitrarily chosen date. As the year's end approached, it was obvious that there were big problems in performance and quality, with a lot of bugs in place and absurd operational requirements. (If I recall rightly, it was so over-complicated a single in-house release took a conference call with more than a dozen people going over a checklist of more than 40 steps.) Did The Hammer pause the work, do some root cause analysis, and improve the situation? Of course not. He demanded everybody work even more hours and ignore anything but the highest priority issues. And so the project limped across the finish line at the last minute, with an enormous backlog of cleanup to do before they could add a single new feature. The team was exhausted. And after the celebratory lunch the next week, they were also demoralized, as they all got The Hammer's hearty congratulations and $50 gift cards. But none of that mattered, because The Hammer's bosses got positive status reports with everything in the green. He was then quickly promoted to a more impressive position in a different area, meaning that the code base he had created, which resembled a pile of manure covered with Christmas paper, was now the problem of some other sucker. I'm sure it eventually had to be rebuilt, providing another hero story for another ladder climber. If I had to guess, the amount of waste on that project was north of $5 million. But by The Hammer's measure and that of his bosses, it was a great success, because they either didn't know or didn't care about the waste.

lamontcg 4y ago

> a rise in a managerial caste That's the problem right there. Pro-nuclear people like to scream about the hippies putting up too many barriers to nuclear plants. Really it is just all the same middle-managers and dynamics at the jobs that they work at everyday. Everyone is willing to spend another few million dollars and a few weeks of delay, which only increases the fiefdom they control, to mitigate some risk and diffuse any possible blame to the rest of the committee. But that also means that we're not going to ever build like China unless our management culture fundamentally changes.

8note 4y ago

An alternative is that nuclear pushback got better in that same time period, and is now more able to cause delays. The same applies with building construction - the governance process have evolved to check for more things with more ability to say no and delay, but without being able to say no(or what needs to change) more quickly