I think there’s another thing driving “The Plan,” which is that each party involved is trying to race to the local maximum of efficiency. We need the plan to be finished so that the whole building can be value engineered to reduce waste (material, labor, whatever).
If you plan the whole building and know the exact forces it is going to encounter in different conditions, you can then spec the exact amount and type of materials you need, which means those have to be created to more exacting standards and there is less tolerance for deviation from The Plan.
There is an environment component to this in that we shouldn’t be intentionally wasteful, but trying to engineer in too much precision seems less efficient when you zoom out for anything that is not mass manufactured.
I agree, but think it's even worse. I think the key local maxima being pursued are the personal interests of managers.
Long ago I worked on a project for a financial company. The exec in charge, known to us as The Hammer, had made big promises to poobahs higher up. So for no real-world reason, his employees worked death-march hours to have everything done by the arbitrarily chosen date. As the year's end approached, it was obvious that there were big problems in performance and quality, with a lot of bugs in place and absurd operational requirements. (If I recall rightly, it was so over-complicated a single in-house release took a conference call with more than a dozen people going over a checklist of more than 40 steps.)
Did The Hammer pause the work, do some root cause analysis, and improve the situation? Of course not. He demanded everybody work even more hours and ignore anything but the highest priority issues. And so the project limped across the finish line at the last minute, with an enormous backlog of cleanup to do before they could add a single new feature. The team was exhausted. And after the celebratory lunch the next week, they were also demoralized, as they all got The Hammer's hearty congratulations and $50 gift cards.
But none of that mattered, because The Hammer's bosses got positive status reports with everything in the green. He was then quickly promoted to a more impressive position in a different area, meaning that the code base he had created, which resembled a pile of manure covered with Christmas paper, was now the problem of some other sucker. I'm sure it eventually had to be rebuilt, providing another hero story for another ladder climber.
If I had to guess, the amount of waste on that project was north of $5 million. But by The Hammer's measure and that of his bosses, it was a great success, because they either didn't know or didn't care about the waste.
We like to refer to manager "fiefdoms" as being "feudal" but they really aren't - feudal lords couldn't just leave their lordship and jump into another larger one somewhere else.
I'm not sure it's a problem that's entirely solvable without some kind of outside force.
If you plan the whole building and know the exact forces it is going to encounter in different conditions, you can then spec the exact amount and type of materials you need, which means those have to be created to more exacting standards and there is less tolerance for deviation from The Plan.
There is an environment component to this in that we shouldn’t be intentionally wasteful, but trying to engineer in too much precision seems less efficient when you zoom out for anything that is not mass manufactured.