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There was an article on slate.com about this same issue [1] where the tl;dr is government organizations outsource project management and any other expertise req
by cduzz 4y ago
There was an article on slate.com about this same issue [1] where the tl;dr is government organizations outsource project management and any other expertise required to run a large scale (or small scale!) infrastructure project.
If the organization that needs a thing done has no idea how to do the thing, it's unsurprising they do it poorly.
[1] https://slate.com/business/2023/02/subway-costs-us-europe-public-transit-funds.html https://slate.com/business/2023/02/subway-costs-us-europe-pu...
- amanaplanacanal 4y agoI worked in state government and saw this all the time. Small projects were done in house but above a certain size they were always contracted out. I don’t know if this was political (general privatization push) or practical (we don’t have the in house expertise).
- vkou 4y agoIt could even be both political and practical, without a sinister motive. (We have no inhouse experience to run a large project, so we're not going to risk mucking everything up in a high-stakes large project (which would be political suicide), so we never build up the inhouse experience to run a large project...)
- Arrath 4y agoI've often seen the lack in in-house expertise bite the owning entities very early in the process: "Oh god even the lowest bid came in 20% above the Engineer's Estimate!" Because the engineer(s) doing the estimate in-house didn't have enough broad experience in the various disciplines to accurately price the project to begin with, it was allocated less funding than necessary when it was put out to bid and the entire process starts out too lean for the needs of the project.