26 June, was supposed to be the final course day of the NAP course Managing Engineering Projects. But that course day did not take place. TU Delft cancelled all on‑campus teaching on the evening of the 25th, and the Code Red advice was not to travel. It would be almost 40 degrees. As a result, there is now a stack of diplomas that we have not yet been able to award. There are final presentations that could not take place. And there is a nice lunch waiting for all of us.
How fitting that was. The theme of the course was precisely how to plan and act in a world that is increasingly becoming increasingly volatile, in which you are more and more often confronted with the uncertainty this creates for the project. We discussed examples of a water pipeline project that came into contact with a high‑voltage power line in Zeeland; of a project in Iraq aimed at a massive reduction in CO₂ where war suddenly enters the picture; of a packaging line for medicines where a supplier suddenly pulls the plug; and of a like‑for‑like replacement in a German chemical plant where, during construction, all kinds of things appear underground that were not supposed to be there. All these cases challenge classical project management thinking (think long enough, draw up a plan covering scope, budget, time and risk, and then implement that plan exactly as written). They made the ground beneath the project shake quite severely.
In the course, our discussions constantly revolved around the role of planning in such a context, and around the extremes that are so tempting in that discussion. “If you think and plan long enough, you can plan for such eventualities as well.” That is a line of reasoning that mainly surfaces in the post‑mortem of a project. Only then does it become clear where the plan failed. You could have seen that beforehand, couldn’t you? So: more planning. Or: “If those plans do not work anyway, then stop making and following plans all the time and improvise much more.” That is a line of reasoning that mainly surfaces at the moment things go wrong, or more precisely: when the plan turns out not to work. Then it appears that a great deal can be arranged through improvisation. Could that not be done much more often?
