Project Delivery and Overengineering are the Same Problem

I have not been posting much lately. The proximate reason is that I spent most of October finalizing with Borners the text of the London construction costs report; there’s still another round of edits but they’re quite small. I don’t want to preview the argument in the report yet, but I do want to talk about one thing that jumped to me while looking at the cost history of London. In New York, we broke down the cost premium into three components, each stacking on the others: labor (primarily overstaffing) raised overall costs by a factor of 1.5, project delivery problems by a factor of a bit more than 2, overdesign of systems and stations combined to a factor of almost 3. Ever since then, almost four years ago, we have tried tackling procurement and poor design separately, having some successes on the latter while nothing has gotten better and much has gotten worse on the former. But what’s emerging out of what we’re seeing in London is that really, the procurement and design premiums…