Nothing is more inspiring than a big vision that becomes a triumphant, new reality. Think of how the Empire State Building went from a sketch to the jewel of New York's skyline in twenty-one months, or how Apple’s iPod went from a project with a single employee to a product launch in eleven months.

How Big Things Get Done is] a book that every legislator, city council member and corporate executive ought to read.” — The Wall Street Journal This just hit the spot for me - accessible, practical lessons in megaproject management with great examples that contrast and compare the possible approaches. The APM Podcast covers discussions and insights on the latest project management topics. Browse our podcasts below and listen for FREE today. The APM Podcast is available on Anchor, Spotify, Apple and Google podcasts.One of the critical factors to a project’s success, argues Flyvbjerg, the first BT Professor and inaugural Chair of Major Programme Management at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, is whether enough thinking time has been put into the planning of the project. By countering our natural human urge to think swiftly, we must slow ourselves down to carefully consider what needs to be done. Over-budget and over-schedule is an inevitability. Incompetence and grift is outrageous. Bent Flyvbjerg, with this terrific data-driven book, has shown that there is another way." — Frank Gehry, architect

Finally the book sums up the lessons from the book and the value that would be obtained if big projects were run better. Thinking ‘right to left’ refers to the process chart – classically the Gantt chart – that is used in most project planning and management, where you have the end result or the outcome on the right, and then everything that needs to happen left of that,” he says. Reference class forecasting refers to doing costing based on ex post data rather than only ex ante assumptions. The call for actual data collection is certainly laudable.

If we’re to make it through these next few decades, we’re going to have to build a lot of stuff—and we’re going to have to do it cheaply and fast. Here’s a very useful handbook for getting things done! ” Nothing is more inspiring than a big vision that becomes a triumphant, new reality. Think of how the Empire State Building went from a sketch to the jewel of New York’s skyline in twenty-one months, or how Apple’s iPod went from a project with a single employee to a product launch in eleven months.

This book is important, timely, instructive, and entertaining.” — Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize–winning author of Thinking, Fast and Slow

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Bent Flyvbjerg is BT professor and chair of major programme management at Saïd Business School. Read more of Bent's blogs here: ' Tokyo 2020: what the postponed Olympics can teach us about crisis response', and 'Why we need ‘smart scale-up’ to deliver cities of the future' Author's insights are very helpful whether you're building the next big project, thinking about that "small” home remodelling job, developing a Hollywood movie, or simply undertaking anything that you think will cost X dollars and take Y time but has potential for spiralling out of control on both fronts.