What We Have to Build Around the Thing We're Building

When the Army started building replacement hospitals about twenty years ago, the people who had done it before had already retired. Shaun O'Leary, who worked on one of those projects, described what followed in a comment on my post this week. By his account, the new teams faced a steep learning curve, and poor coordination led to mistakes, delays and eventually lawsuits. The teams weren't kept together afterwards, so the next hospital faced much of the same learning again. On his project, they spent three years after opening day fixing what had been done poorly.

My post was about the U.S. Department of Energy's conditional commitment in June of US$17.5 billion in loans for long-lead equipment for up to ten Westinghouse AP1000 reactors. The proposed financing would help secure equipment that takes years to make. Whether the tenth reactor goes better than the first also depends on whether the people who learned on the first are still around to build it. World Nuclear News

Several other stories in the week's reading brought me back to that dependency. A Singapore company proposed buying a decade of lending experience, and an Alberta lithium developer moved towards supplying a customer in India. Canada discussed a deeper relationship with Europe, while workers in Brampton tried to work out what a possible sale of their plant would mean for them. Each plan depends on people, on the experience they carry and on the commitments they make so that somebody else can move forward, often well before anyone can be certain of the outcome.

The Next Project Needs the People Who Learned on the Last One

We know the habit well. We assemble a team, deliver the project, capture the lessons learned and send everyone somewhere else. Then the next team spends months working out what the last one already knew.

Some of that knowledge never makes it into a document. It includes knowing which supplier will raise a problem early, or why an apparently unnecessary step in commissioning saves a miserable afternoon later. People build that judgment by doing the work together, often after getting something wrong.

Grab put a price on that kind of learning this week. It announced a proposed acquisition of a majority stake in Atome Financial for about US$1.49 billion. Its chief operating officer described the opportunity to gain ten years of learning across lending products and markets, including the losses incurred while developing the credit models. The deal still needs approvals, but the reasoning is plain: someone else has already spent years learning how to do this. The Business Times

Buying that experience doesn't settle the problem on its own, though. Grab still has to retain the people it needs and combine the businesses in a way that preserves what made the experience worth buying.

We recognize the value of accumulated experience when we're paying for it, yet still let it scatter when our own project ends. Keeping a core team together has a visible cost. Shaun described practical ways to support that continuity, including long-term incentives, travel and housing, extra time off to help families, and better documentation.

He estimated that such a program could cost less than 1% of the project. That is his estimate rather than a costed proposal, but it makes me wonder why we so rarely put the cost of keeping experience beside the cost of acquiring it all over again, when relearning it spreads across enough budgets that nobody quite adds it up.

Somebody Has to Own the Point Where Our Output Becomes Their Input

E3 Lithium has signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding with Epsilon CAM covering potential supply of battery-grade lithium carbonate from its Clearwater project in Alberta to a cathode-materials business in India. It's an early commercial step, with final terms still to be negotiated. E3 Lithium

In my post about the investment summit, I looked at the distance between attracting investment and producing something a customer can actually use. This agreement also draws attention to the project at the other end of that relationship.

A producer needs enough confidence in future demand to build capacity, and a customer needs enough confidence in future supply to plan its own operation. Each may be waiting for evidence the other can't fully provide until somebody commits money.

Contracts help make that uncertainty manageable. So does the quieter work of engineers agreeing on product specifications and project teams keeping their dates visible to each other. If one side carries an optimistic assumption it never shares, that assumption can become the other side's missed production target a few years later.

That's why these relationships belong inside the delivery plan, next to the milestones they affect. Someone has to own the point where our promised output becomes another organization's required input, and that person's name should be on the plan.

Two Organizations Can Approve the Same Thing and Mean Different Things

Canada's conversation with Europe makes the question much larger. In his September 17 address to the European Parliament, Prime Minister Mark Carney proposed deeper cooperation in strategic areas including critical minerals and defence production. He also proposed more opportunities for people to study and work on either side of the Atlantic. Address to the European Parliament

If those proposals move forward, each will eventually land on somebody's desk as work. A supplier may have to qualify under another country's standards. People with different approval processes will have to agree on what they can promise and by when.

Two groups can agree completely on the objective and still mean different things when they say a decision is approved. The difference gets expensive once one team starts spending against a commitment the other still considers provisional.

That is familiar territory in projects that cross organizational boundaries, even within the same country. Someone has to ask whether approval means the money is available, whether another committee still has a say, and what could cause the decision to be reopened.

The agreements set the direction. Making them work requires enough repeated contact for people to understand how the other organization actually makes decisions, and enough confidence in the relationship to raise the awkward question early.

The People Carrying the Change Need a Future in It

Brampton brings the consequences for people's working lives into sharper focus. Stellantis has signed a memorandum of understanding with Roshel on a possible sale of its idled assembly plant. Unifor warns that the proposed closure and sale threaten members' wages, pensions and benefits, and is calling for federal intervention. Unifor's statement, Global News

From a distance, finding a new use for an industrial site can look like a sensible transfer of capability. For someone whose working life is tied to that plant, the questions are more immediate: will there be a job, and will it support the life they built around the last one?

Those questions belong in any assessment of whether a transition works. Keeping a building occupied doesn't answer them. Asking people to welcome a new industrial strategy while their own future remains unclear is asking a great deal.

Some of this week's plans need experienced teams to stay together. Others, like the one in Brampton, ask workers to place their future in an arrangement they had little part in shaping.

On our own projects, we can at least make those dependencies visible. Before assuming the next phase will be easier, find out which experienced people will actually be available, and if the plan depends on them staying, give them something more definite than a promise that there will be opportunities.

Whose future are we asking to depend on our plan, and have we given them enough certainty to make that a reasonable bet?

About this series

I've spent weeks writing about the real-life implications of stories in the news each day and kept finding the same threads running through them. Each Saturday I pick one thread and pull on it to see where it leads for the people doing the work. The headlines are usually about money and policy, but how things turn out depends on the people who have to make them work, and the best part of this so far has been hearing from them in the comments about what the headline left out. If you've lived through one of these stories yourself, I'd like to hear about it. Sources are linked in the text, and the opinions are mine.

About the author

Derrick Greenwood writes about operating models, delivery and the decisions that get made in the room before the go-live. He gets called in when big projects have big problems.