Mankind and Mega-projects

Throughout history mankind has sought to improve its economic and even its spiritual development through the creation of gargantuan and awe-inspiring infrastructure projects. The twenty-first century has seen the rapid growth of the use of this type of project in providing society's needs: such projects are widely referred to as “mega-projects”. Mega-projects are extremely large-scale infrastructure projects typically costing more than $1 billion. Mega-projects include power-plant(conventional, nuclear or renewable), oil and gas extraction and processing projects and transport projects such as highways and tunnels, bridges, railways, seaports and even cultural events such as the Olympics. Mega-projects are united by their extreme complexity(both in technical and human terms) and by a long record of poor delivery. What to do in the face of this dilemma is a question that is still being asked by mega-project practitioners and academics alike.This paper presents the unique work of the MEGAPROJECT COST Action which brings together a multi-disciplinary network of over 80 researchers from 24 countries to respond to this dilemma. Mega-project's aim involves capturing the existing performance of large infrastructural mega-projects and understanding how their delivery can be improved. In order to do this, the investigation has gathered together the MEGAPROJECT Portfolio. The Portfolio contains meta-data on a wide range of mega-projects from across countries and sectors and acts as a firm empirical foundation for the investigation's activities. Having assembled the MEGAPROJECT Portfolio, this paper shows how analyzing the Portfolio shatters myths of mega-project management and identifies new areas of fruitful investigation. Mega-project's findings downplay the importance of formal project management tools and techniques in insuring successful delivery. Instead mega-project high-lights the need to concentrate on the impact of financing on project governance, the technical modularization of the project and the devastating roles that eternal stakeholders can have on mega-project delivery. Most importantly, it discusses how we can effectively learn across mega-projects in order to maximize their value to their stakeholders and to society as a whole.