In this blog post I will briefly outline the reasons why Berlin Brandenburg airport became one of the most notorious project failures in recent history with reference to the Lars Mieritz "Gartner Survey Shows Why Projects Fail" article. As the title suggests, smaller projects (with budgets below $350 000) have a higher chance of succeeding and being delivered on time. Undoubtedly, such an important and ambitious project of building one of the biggest and busiest airports in Germany and Europe is expected to have a colossal scope which is already extremely challenging, but in addition to that, one of the main reasons the project failed is the fact that it was subjected to significant scope changes. One of the key stakeholders, seizing on increasing forecasts for air traffic, requested the architect to add north and south “piers” to the main terminal with construction under way, turning it from a rectangle into a “U” and dramatically enlarging the floor space. As stated by Mieritz in the previously mentioned article, many large projects fail because business conditions keep changing after the project scope has been set creating a significant discrepancy between the budget and the scope initially agreed on and the final cost and logistics the business will require when the project is finished. The estimated budget of the project was around €2 billion and by the time the project was delivered (substantially late -10 years later than planned) the budget exceeded that amount three times - final cost of the project was €7 billion.
Apart from scope, communication is another essential factor that will determine whether the project will be a success or a failure. Taking into account the scope of the Berlin
airport project, naturally it will involve a huge number of stakeholders that have different expectations, visions and financial interest. Some of those stakeholders were German Federal Government, the state of Brandenburg, the airlines, passengers, staff, Berlin citizens, other two airports etc.
By maintaining close rapport to all the stakeholders, and being honest and open regarding the relation between functionality scope and schedule, expectations can be adjusted on an ongoing basis, thus improving success rates. Berlin airport project failed to do so in many ways. As the project was progressing, some severe functionality issues were occurring that could have been dealt with earlier had the mayor communicated those openly and honestly with other stakeholders, though by failing to do so, there was no sense of urgency and with it the opportunity for a timely corrective action was gone.
Another reason for the project's failure were insufficient quality checks that could have detected problems at an early stage and reduce costs of remedying them later. Some of them were a nonfunctional fire protection, an alarm system that was not built in accordance with relevant building codes, wrongly placed smoke extractors, and similar. All of them of essential importance when building an airport meant to host 45 million passengers annually.
To conclude, the project was eventually delivered, although10 years and €5 billion later and with a little extra - providing a good example of why projects fail to be used by project management students.
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