My projects are very hard to budget and schedule accurately, especially to the degree they involve skilled labor, and my projects tend to be much smaller than NASAs, with far less cutting edge tech and development and with much less demanding requirements.
Can any large organization reliably and accurately budget, schedule, and then implement large, complex projects? Which ones? How do they do it?
Could it be that NASA takes on the toughest, most daring and most technically complex projects around?
On the medical device projects I work on delays, overruns and issues come into play often. I can only imagine if the medical device I was working on not only had to not injure the patient, but do it in a vacuum, survive the radiation and survive launch!
> The US Navy created Program Analysts and Review Technique (PERT) for projects like that. It seems to have worked pretty well.
The U.S. military, including the Navy, makes plenty of headlines for over-budget, over-schedule projects. For the Navy look at their highest profile recent projects: Ford-class aircraft carriers, Zumwalt destroyers, and, IIRC, the LCS.
>>> Can any large organization reliably and accurately budget, schedule, and then implement large, complex projects? Which ones? How do they do it?
Yes, it's fairly doable to set the project budget and schedule. Most organizations can do that fairly accurately.
The thing is that most people don't understand what a budget is. For instance, when a project is given 2M dollars and a year. It doesn't mean that the project will costs 2M dollars and be completed in a year, not at all. It means that there will be a few people allocated on it, with maybe some hardware, and we will see what we get at the end of the year.
Can any large organization reliably and accurately budget, schedule, and then implement large, complex projects? Which ones? How do they do it?