Clever investment, cool stuff and why bigger isn't better

I use this when I want to get out of doing the dishes.

There are times when one despairs of sensible investment in the UK. The talk of throwing over £40 billion into HS2 and the ongoing debate as to the best location for airport expansion in South East England can easily lead one to think that all politicians are obsessed with big dumb investments and value posturing in front of vast steel and concrete white elephants above prosperity and opportunity for all. Then you read about some under reported but very clever investments HMG has made in UK high tech industries. Like the £36m various bodies like the office of the Mayor of London and SE development agencies put into Inmarsat ( read more here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23380147 ) or the £60m HMG Treasury put into the SABRE engine ( more here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23332592 ) which are two or three orders of magnitude smaller than the grand gestures proposed for UK transport infrastructure, but have the potential to deliver vast benefits for the UK in terms of wealth, opportunity and advancement.

This isn’t to say that I don’t recognise that infrastructure costs a lot. It does, but I’ve always questioned the value of vast engineering projects balanced against a thousand smaller ones. For example a third bridge over the Thames at Reading would have vast value for Reading and the M4 Corridor, would HS2 really deliver over two thousand times the value of that long desired bridge? For that is how much more it will cost than RB3. I’d much prefer two thousand new bridges in the UK than one rail link from London to Birmingham, since we already have a pretty decent one of those anyway.

As a manager and architect/engineer I really don’t like to place all of my eggs in one basket. Investment capital is limited and putting it all into one or two mega-scale projects seems risky to me. Billion dollar projects can go a lot more wrong than a thousand, million dollar projects and I suspect that working out the real benefit from these projects is a lot clearer than working out what happened when you threw a billion dollars at something.

I suspect that the reasons politicians and bureaucrats like the grand project more than the programme of work is two-fold, announcing new drains isn’t sexy or likely to make you look like the striding leader of the future and writing one business case for a billion dollars is a lot easier than writing a thousand business cases for one million dollars. And the reason people would write a thousand business cases is that they don’t really understand programme -v- project. Politicians are very guilty of this. They think programme just equals bigger project and that lots of small projects must be harder to manage than one big one. This is for various reasons:

·         People still misunderstand and misuse PRINCE2 and MSP

·         People still don’t link costs to benefits properly

·         People still don’t manage risks properly and rely on tolerance/transfer rather than treatment/termination

·         People don’t plan properly

·         People still get credit for failure in improper ways

The last point is important for me, failure is a fact of life, we all cock things up and the critical things about cock-ups come in two parts. Don’t ever hide it, confess the cock up early so it can be fixed and make sure you understand what went wrong and work to make sure it never happens again. If you do both of these the failure is the best educator. If you do neither or worse pretend to do the latter, then failure breeds more failure.

So I’m glad to see that parts of Government don’t think like this, they are prepared to invest wisely in interesting ventures where the benefits of failure are almost the same as the price of success.