Nate Habermeyer, APR: 0:00

Hello listeners. This is the risky planner podcast. Thanks for tuning. In, Otter. Is it too late to say

Albert Brier: 0:12

Happy New Year? Albert, it's never too late to say Happy New Year. Happy New Year.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 0:16

No, it's got to be within two weeks and then a Seinfeld episode. Well, anyways, happy

Albert Brier: 0:20

new year. Happy new to you. I mean, yeah, we've been talking, of course, like we've, yeah, we this is not the first time we've said Happy New Year to each other, but only one opportunity. We've only talked once. That's true. We haven't just only once.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 0:32

But Well, we're, I think we got a really this is going to be an interesting season, let me just say, because we've got some really exciting episodes planned. But before we talk about that, you know, this episode is going to be, is pretty fun.

Albert Brier: 0:47

It's, yeah, this is a fun one. We were kind of dream boarding this one from last year, and I think we've got some good, good stuff to talk about. But before we get into that, how was your break?

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 0:57

Yeah, my break was restful because I didn't do too much, yeah? Like, we went up to my in laws, my my father in law's house, and other than that, like, no, didn't do too much. It was great. Lot of like, just lying low.

Albert Brier: 1:13

You did. I developed some extremely damaging habits, W, slash r slash T, sleeping too long and eating too much. Yeah. So, you know, it's been really hard to break those since I got back into adulting and the New Year adulting.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 1:29

Yeah, it's true. I said it last year, and I'll say it again, but like, the break kind of makes me nervous, because then the first week you get back, it's just a constant, like, Oh my God, what's going on? Like, you gotta follow up with people. You gotta like, what? Where did this thing go? It's a lot of like, scrambling. Yeah, it is. But I think we're in a good place. Like we announced some news this week. Man, it was a major week for

Albert Brier: 1:53

a major week. Huge week for us. Major week. We are recording this on January the 22nd just to be clear. And earlier this week, we announced a partnership with Saud consult, that's right, which is a huge deal for us, and also, frankly, maybe getting a little too big for our bridges here, but for Canada,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 2:10

no, it's it's huge. So Saud consult is the oldest and largest engineering firm in Saudi Arabia. They've got 2800 uh, engineers, you know, Team employees, staff across the kingdom, and we are teaming up with them to bring our, our, our brand of project controls and system implementation in an apcm model to the kingdom. So it's really exciting. It's not only so that's cool, but even cooler was the Minister of International Trade from Canada. He gave us a quote for our news release, an endorsement, and then after the fact, and that announcement came on the 20th so that's just two days ago, and then after the fact, just yesterday, the Canadian ambassador to Saudi Arabia, yeah, tagged really cool on LinkedIn. So it's been a huge week for us.

Albert Brier: 3:10

This all makes more sense in context when you understand that our CEO, Tarek do kanesh was part of the trade delegation to Saudi that just came back, like they just came home. So, you know, we had a couple of folks there to represent Canada's competitive advantages and interests in collaboration with the kingdom, and it went really well, like we, you know, obviously it was that one deal, but that wasn't the only one. Like, you can go check on LinkedIn and see all kinds of other interesting stuff that came out of that delegation. But, you know, this is all part of that whole geopolitical reorganization that happens for reasons we won't get into. But, yeah,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 3:53

well, I mean, and I, you know, I'm saying it's a huge week. It's, let's be clear, like we have a solution and services that are peerless in the market, so to speak. And there is so much work that's happening in Saudi Arabia and UAE and GCC nations that it's the place like we're supposed we should be there, because we're gonna have an impact.

Albert Brier: 4:22

So especially since a lot of the projects that are that are happening, there are sufferings from some pretty typical mega project woes, yep, which happened to be the topic of today's episode. Segue. Thanks, right? Yeah, unfortunately, it was an excellent segue that I'm going to have to segue directly out of. But because before we get to that, yeah, let's Yeah, our survey, yeah.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 4:44

So we, you know, we're a year in, we'd love to get to know you better our listeners this year. And so starting with this episode, we're going to be running the survey to get to know you better, and we're going to be asking you. Have several questions, we'll make sure that it's doesn't take a lot of your time, but we'd really appreciate it if you engage with us and let us know who you are and sort of what you would be interested in hearing more of you know, feedback is always welcomed, so stay tuned. We'll have more information at the end of the show

Albert Brier: 5:19

for sure. So we'll we won't belabor it any further, but look for a link to that in the show notes. We'll also get it out on LinkedIn. So if you're the kind of person that only listens to the first 10 minutes of a podcast, this is for you. Go check us out on LinkedIn. Follow that link, complete our survey, help us out.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 5:36

Yeah, we're under that 10 minutes mark, so hopefully people are still

Albert Brier: 5:39

boy, just under,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 5:43

okay, Albert, let me segue back to the episode and our topic at hand, Yep, yeah. And so last month, we were talking about like a concept of a capital project time machine, where we spend a bit of time going back and dissecting the mistakes or decision making, the risks, the delays and projects that turned into disasters, and just spending some time dissecting them, ones that you will know very well, and bringing our own brand of expertise to them,

Albert Brier: 6:18

yeah, like you can come you kind of think of it as like, what if we were time traveling project managers from the year 2026 going back in time to run these projects again? Right? What would we do differently? What would we know that could maybe change the outcome a little bit? And I think it's worth mentioning that these projects are all failures from the perspective of their cost and schedule performance, but not all of them are, you know, failures, from the perspective of, did they achieve their objectives, right? You know, some of the things we're going to talk about are absolutely iconic. And, in fact, let's, let's start with arguably the most iconic, the Sydney Opera House.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 6:58

Yeah, the Sydney Opera House is beautiful. It's like, really put I mean, it's emblematic of Sydney as a city, even like Australia as a country. Yes, it has incredible significance. It's beautiful by all measures. It's a success, right? Like after

Albert Brier: 7:16

the fact, yeah, yeah. I mean it. I don't know how good it is as an opera house, but it sure looks great on a postcard, right? And it's in the background of like every movie that films in Australia. I mean, it is undeniably one of the architectural marvels of the world, that's right? And all that cost just over 13 100% of what they thought it was going to cost.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 7:42

13 cost. 1300 Yeah, okay, let's, let's jump into it. Albert, what are your thoughts like right away?

Albert Brier: 7:48

Well, I think it's worth mentioning this in the next one we're going to talk about which, you know, spoiler alert, it's the Big Dig. We can't shut up about the Big Dig. So we're not going to. But the in both of these cases, you're talking about projects that, you know, like we said, unmitigated successes from the perspective of, did they get the thing done, right? I mean, in fact, the City of Sydney considers the project to be a pretty massive success. Now, this is, you know, 60 years on from from when the thing was actually finished, but it's, it generates a ton of revenue. It's a it's a massive tourist draw, like it's, it is a success. But that doesn't mean that it couldn't have been done for a smaller price tag. And yeah, the thing was delivered 10 years late, 10 years Yeah, yeah.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 8:34

So people don't remember right, the pain or the frustration of some of these projects. You know, the Big Dig In particular in Boston that was like, by all measures, that's, that's a success, right? They're talking about doing another one, and that, after the fact, is, yeah, let's, you know, all is forgiven. Let's go. Maybe people get voted out of office and whatnot. But there's, well, that's something

Albert Brier: 8:59

that we're definitely because when, when schedules go long like they did on on Sydney, right? There are political changes that happen. People start to want to throw rocks. Yeah. So when, when new politicians do, new administrations come in, they want to throw rocks at the old team and start making changes and stuff, and making changes to your by the way, this is going to be point one that we're talking about, like, the longer, by the way, it's not my point. It's, it's, it's something I'm lifting, as I often do from Ben flyberg. He put this pretty Nate's laughing at me, holler, holler, bent back, shout out to shout out to Professor flyberg. There's a lot of, there's a lot of Ben flyberg In this episode, just, you know, race, that's the research is right? So that's where it comes from, a lot of it. But in this particular case, it's about that window of risk, right? The longer you spend in execution, the more stuff can go wrong. So you know the old truism that $1 spent in planning is worth $1.50 in execution is even truer. On mega projects and iconic projects and unique or first of a kind projects, than it is on your average everyday project. And it's pretty true on your average everyday project.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 10:10

Yeah, that's right. So Albert, can we? Can you just kind of level set on the Sydney Opera House, like we're gonna go back in time? Let's start at that moment. What are we? What are we looking at, and as an executive, sort of overseeing that project and sort of, what are you prioritizing? Sure?

Albert Brier: 10:27

So first off, I want to say that the if the Sydney Opera House is, is, is, like, emblematic of any one kind of project failure. It's a failure of scoping, right? Of like having some arms around your scope. So my favorite factoid about this is that, you know, in the mid 50s, there was an architectural contest for the new opera house in Sydney, and the winning sketch was so beautiful and so iconic and so revolutionary that the committee awarding the prize to the to the architects ignored the fact that it did not meet almost any of the requirements for a valid submittal to the architectural contest, right? It didn't include structural calculations. It didn't include, like, a constructability plan. It was literally just a sketch, right? So when we talk about building something from the back of napkin, that's the Sydney Opera House. That's literally where, you know, flash forward to 14 100% of cost overruns. Now you know why, right? They had absolutely no idea how to build the roof shells. Construction began in 1959 they didn't know how they were going to build the roof geometry until three years later. So anybody who's ever built anything before might be thinking, but hang on, they were three years into construction, and they didn't know how the roof was going to be. So how did they build the foundations?

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 11:50

So when you go back in time, you're you're going all the way back to the contest to begin with, right?

Albert Brier: 11:56

Because that's when the planning starts. Yeah,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 11:59

so, what's the conversation you'd have with that panel?

Albert Brier: 12:03

Well, first off, I would tell them, you know. And then again, like everybody listening to this is going to immediately key into like, oh, hindsight is 2020, of course, yeah, yeah, time traveling. That's the point. That's the point. Okay, yeah. So you know what we know now is that projects like this one have a tendency to run massively over on schedule, and then those schedule issues tend to translate into cost issues, right? So you know, back to that, you know dollar in planning, dollar 50 and execution thing, you spend as much time as you can in project planning, you spend as much time as you can getting your arms around the scope. That doesn't mean that owners have to develop their own scope or own their own scope. In fact, that's a really inefficient way of doing things, usually. But at the very least, you and the people who are responsible for the design you know you as an owner, need to get your arms around what you're building before you break ground. Right, right? So I mentioned earlier, we don't have roof geometry solved until three years into construction. How did they build the foundation? Well, the answer is, they built it wrong, right? They had to rip out the foundation and rebuild it three years into construction, right? So how crazy is that?

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 13:11

Yeah, it's pretty wild. So walk me through it, like put yourself on that panel and you're looking at the napkin. Let's say you're looking at the sketch. What are the questions that you're asking your fellow panelists to consider?

Albert Brier: 13:26

Well, you know, in this case, I don't even have to be a time traveler to answer that question, because there were, I mean, I would be, but I would because

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 13:33

of these. It's not real. It's not even time travel, time traveling, yeah. I mean, I don't have to

Albert Brier: 13:39

be a real time traveler, obviously. But even somebody at the time, people did raise this concern at the time, it wasn't a compliant bid, right? So, like the it's really interesting. It's something that they probably should have considered, you know, for another building, someplace else, or whatever. But there is an argument to be made that they should have been to that sketch, right, or at the very least, if they were so married to the idea that that sketch was the winner, then they should have given all of the proponents an extra two weeks or something to develop their designs further. And like, you can put a smoke screen up and saying, like, Hey, we got a really a lot of really great bids. We want to see them developed more. So we're adding two weeks of the contest to flesh out structural details and constructability, and, you know, do a little bit of early doors planning, which you can very much do in two weeks off a sketch, right? Because you don't need much, but you need something, right? They literally had no idea how they were going to build this thing when they said, Yep, that's our winner, right? So, you know, initially they were going to build the whole opera house, and, granted, this was in the mid 50s. In the mid 50s, for 7 million Australian dollars. That's crazy. And that 14 100% price increase takes us up over 100 million Yeah. So by the way, 100 million dollars for that building is a steal

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 14:57

in today's dollars, yeah, I was gonna say in today's. These dollars. Wait a second, you have to, like, adjust, yeah. So what were all the like? What else did you discover about sort of Sydney's Opera House and the process by which they built it? One thing

Albert Brier: 15:11

that's really crazy about it is that it very nearly did not get fully funded, right? There was, there were, there were 496 special lotteries that raised the exact amount required to finish the building. Okay, wow. So the the taxpayers in Sydney were ready to tear the building down, you know, with sticks and rocks, because it was taking so long and costing so much like people were expecting to go see operas in there when the roof wasn't even on yet, right, right? So, you know, it's delivering something 10 years late. Is, is, is, you know, it's pretty bad. And like, we're gonna have some others that are that are in that same timeframe. But you know, this one really stands out for being a massive overrun on both cost and schedule, and people noticed, right, right? So, you know, the the architect resigned, and you know, before the building was finished, like in 1966 he resigned, and he never came back to Australia ever. Wow, yeah, so, and by the way, what's really crazy 1966 when we're talking about in 2007 UNESCO, right? The United Nate. What does UNESCO stand for?

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 16:26

Nate, United Nations,

Albert Brier: 16:30

yeah, yeah. We're blanking on this one. You're

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 16:33

just supposed to say UNESCO, yeah,

Albert Brier: 16:35

but it does stand for something. So Nate. Rescue me from this googling while I explain that UNESCO named this a World Heritage Site in 20 in 2007 while the main architect, a guy called Utzon, was still alive. Okay, that is the only time that's ever happened. And this is the youngest building that has ever been listed as a World Heritage Site.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 16:57

It's the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, but you know, it's, it's, it's like the this sagrida familia in Sagrada Familia, yeah, thank you. Is was a UNESCO heritage site before it was finished. But you know, everybody who planned that was, you know, long dead,

Albert Brier: 17:22

Oh, yeah. I mean, the that was a different thing, yeah, this is, that's a whole separate thing, because you can actually, I've been inside

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 17:28

so have ielio is beautiful. It's crazy,

Albert Brier: 17:33

worth every dollar spent on this. But again, same thing for the Opera House, right? Like, massive failure went way over on everything. But come on, man, it's the Sydney Opera House.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 17:42

You know? What's funny is the we're going to talk about the so the Sydney Opera House, the Big Dig, we're going to talk about some other projects. All of these projects had capable people, right? They had a PMO, right? The these were smart people, but they, they or the group, or the, you know, the sponsor, they all made bad decisions at certain points with the data that they had.

Albert Brier: 18:13

Yep, right? Well, for sure, and sometimes that's for very understandable reasons. Now, I don't think you could throw that particular rock at Sydney. So much. I don't think there was any real strategic misrepresentation going on there, but strategic misrepresentation is definitely the theme of our next project that we're going to talk about, which is the Big Dig,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 18:33

yeah, and that was, that was something, you know, it's been well covered in the media. There's lots of research. So I think we can spend a little bit of time sort of, how would you have approached that, even, like some of the community engagement was, was pretty wild in terms of trying to get that through and finished. But was that an was that a project where it's just kind of like, let's get it started and we'll sort of plan it as we go?

Albert Brier: 19:01

No, it wasn't. It wasn't intended to be that. It was actually subject to a great deal of planning, but the planning was was wholly insufficient to the task of actually building it. So this is like, unlike the Sydney Opera House, which basically got started with no plan, the Big Dig, got started with what everybody thought was a pretty good plan. You know, there, with the exception of people who were, you know, what we would now call NIMBYs, right, like folks who were just not interested in having a giant construction project in their backyard, like those people didn't love the plan. There were always alternative solutions, right? Because the point of the Big Dig was to delete a large elevated highway structure that went right through the middle of downtown Boston and reclaim all that space for like green space and housing and things like that, and, you know, improve air quality and improve noise levels and all that stuff. So, like all of those, those objectives could have been met in a variety of ways, right, right? So the Big Dig was just the one that won out. Right? But there were always people who were against it, and that actually is one of the things that made it take so dang long, because this one, you know, the Sydney Opera House, went over by 14 100% the Big Dig, went over by a lot more than that. Well, in real dollars, in real dollars, in real dollars, right about 560% but it was over budget by what was it like? $20 billion something like that. I mean, we're talking about a starting cost of 2.6 billion, a finished cost of 14 point 8 billion. But there were also $9 billion dollars in interest in servicing on the actual funding. So there's a total cost of $24 billion on an initial $2.6 billion budget. So if you include all that stuff, it's almost 10x Yeah.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 20:54

And you know what is interesting? Like I said, like there were seasoned planners, there were seasoned project controllers, you know, smart executive sponsors. Do you think like the data wasn't there that caused the overruns, or was it that, you know, the executives or whomever didn't want to pay attention to what the data was saying. Well, I

Albert Brier: 21:22

mentioned that strategic misrepresentation was a big part of this. Trusting your contractors too much is another part. We'll get to that. But, like, what is strategic misrepresentation? So on the subject of smart executives, yeah, like you, generally speaking, there are some exceptions, of course, but you don't get to be a project executive, you know, overseeing a mega project, if you're a, if you're a dumb, dumb, okay, you're probably a pretty smart cookie. That's probably have a term, yeah, dumb, dumb, definitely a technical term, yeah? But, like, there's a pretty good chance that you got your head screwed on straight. You've done that's right, something big like this before, even if it isn't this specific thing. So you kind of know what you're looking at. You know you're not a nobody, right? You know what? You know your stuff. But executives tend to fall into a trap that leads to strategic misrepresentation on projects. So what is strategic misrepresentation? It's project managers and project teams intentionally lowballing their estimates when they're communicating to stakeholders outside the project team, like Project executives or the general public, or, you know, whomever else, for the purposes of getting their project approved. Okay, so strategic misrepresentation, you might have guessed another Ben fleiberg term it. This is from way, way back, though, like the 90s, he kind of think, or maybe even the 80s, he coined this term. But the idea here is that, and I've seen it happen in real life, in my own projects, like in miniature, compared to the Big Dig. But you know, I'm always the project manager, like I had a reputation when I was working for big oil company that you definitely heard of for bringing projects to their their approval gates, so that they could be killed, right, right? Because they would hand me the projects. I would cost them accurately, right? Build risk in, make sure the schedule was executable, like do constructibility, so all that stuff right for much, much smaller projects than this, but I would bring them to the gate. Everybody be like, great job. You passed your gate, and then they wouldn't fund it because it was too expensive, too expensive. And I always had the thought in the back, I wasn't as well read on this stuff as you know, then, as I am now. But like, I always had, the thought in my mind is like, man, should I have just gone in with the last guy's numbers? Like, you know, I typically was taking these projects over from other people who had gone to a previous gate and said it cost, you know, some number, and that number would be three or four times lower than the one that I would present. So it's like, if I just came in with the lower number, would I be running a project right now, like strategic misrepresentation, right?

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 23:47

And so, you know, it makes me think of, if I'm going to go in, I'm going to low ball, and then I'm going to get it approved, and then I'm going to start, what's the moment where, all of a sudden we have to have that conversation. Yeah, yeah. I need more money. I need more money. And, like, what does that look like from an executive sponsors perspective, right? This is like a coming to Jesus moment,

Albert Brier: 24:13

or whoever can be it, come to deity of choice, come to date of choice. It could be, it could be, but it often isn't. And I think this is where the the real insidious nature of strategically misrepresenting your project for approval really comes in because you then have to, because you're effectively exploiting two cognitive biases when you're doing this. One is small number better than big number, right? Like when, when you see big number, you think, Well, that's pretty expensive, right? Sticker Shock, right? Is the common term for it. Yeah, ex executives absolutely get sticker shock. So when you start talking to them about your project, which, you know, some joker in another country told you was going to cost this much and take this long, you know, thinking here specifically a big way. Company, they would frequently do their estimates out of Houston, and then, like, here I am in Calgary, and I have to go run this project in the oil sands. And I'm like, these numbers are a fantasy, right, right? So if you, if you just take those numbers, which are designed to get projects approved, and run with them, then you're going to run up against, you know, change order city, for sure. But all that is in service of, like, big numbers, scary, right, right? So that's one cognitive bias. The other one is sunk cost fallacy. Yeah, right. We've talked about that before on the show. So when projects are underway and they are starting to show signs of life, right? Like there, it's clear that, you know, you dig your big trench, you're going to put some pipe in it, and then one day, there's going to be a fire hydrant at the other end, your fire hydrant project will be ready, right? So once that starts, it's hard to stop, right?

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 25:51

That's right. So when you're doing a project as large as the Big Dig, at a point like you just can't, you can't stop, like, you have to finish it, right? Yeah, and that probably happened early on, when some of the construction started. I mean, there's no looking back, well there.

Albert Brier: 26:10

So this is what I'm talking about with sunk cost fallacy, though, you just summed it up beautifully. Like, that's exactly what people are thinking when they're having these difficult conversations about cost and schedule overruns. Because they're thinking, well, like, we can't turn back now, yeah, you can, absolutely you can. I mean, there does come a point where it makes more sense to finish than it would to stop and start over, but that point is much, much later than most people think, right? And we have examples, you know, in the canon of projects which we should probably pick. This one, I can't remember the specific name of it, but there was a large Super Collider that, I think, you know, folded up its tent in the 90s, early 2000s we'll do some research on that one and bring it up. But, like, yeah, maybe that one cost.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 26:52

We could do another episode on, like, just defense. We definitely just scientific. Yeah, that would be interesting. We're gonna do another one. Sorry, go ahead.

Albert Brier: 26:58

Yeah, but that, that project cost more to dismantle than it would have to finish, and the dismantling, I believe, is still ongoing, right? And that all took place while another better Super Collider was being built, right? So it made it really difficult to justify finishing. So there's lots of ingredients in that too, and we'll definitely talk more about it, because it's a really interesting one, but that one was definitely too far along to justify canceling it, right? But the Big Dig was delivered nine years late.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 27:28

You know, let's put yourself in the room as the executive sponsor, looking at some of that initial planning and proposals. You know that you're at the first decision gate, like, what could you as the executive sponsor have asked, or what could you have pushed for that would have given you sort of better insight beyond that strategic misrepresentation?

Albert Brier: 27:51

Well, one of the reasons why strategic misrepresentation works for getting projects across the starting line is because executives don't have as much information as project managers and project teams do, so they're reliant on others for that information, and if that information seems to support a small number case, then they will approve it, right? So in order. So I guess the point is, you know, we as time traveling project managers, we know what went wrong, right? But that doesn't mean that we should expect people, at the time to, like, look at a number and know, oh, that number is too small, right? But that's not a fair expectation. So what you have to do instead is ask a bunch of general questions that would apply to any project that would either validate that the estimates are good or not, right. So one of those is, have you built risk into this, right? How much risk? Like, what kinds of risks? So for something, anything that's going underground, right? And as the Big Dig name would imply, it's underground,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 28:56

one is also big. It's also big. Yeah, that was a horrible dad joke.

Albert Brier: 29:00

Okay, yeah, that's fine. No, don't worry about it, buddy. You are horrible. I'm trying, yeah, I'm just kidding. I'm sure you're a wonderful dad. But anyway, there were, there were massive, massive risks that were encountered on this project. For example, as pretty much as soon as I started digging, they realized that there were a set of unmapped underground utilities there that were over 150 years old. 50 years old. There were no as built drawings, no maps, nothing. The geology hadn't been adequately figured out, so they had to keep stopping the dig to deal with these kinds of issues. And that's the kind of thing that you you can't see coming specifically when you're on day one of a project, when you haven't broken ground yet. So that's where risk estimation comes in, and some risks may over top the actual scope of the that's what happened here, right? Like paying for these risks and for the consequences, like the costs of those risks, is what made this project. So expensive, right?

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 30:01

But what I'm hearing from you is like, even though you don't know that those actual utilities by asking a more general question, look, Boston is an old town, yeah, there's going to be stuff buried underground, perhaps. So what are we going to do when we encounter that? Not if, but when? We're going to kind of just assuming the risk is real, and just assuming that, because it's old, there's going to be stuff, right? So I that's what I'm hearing from you. And I think, yeah,

Albert Brier: 30:30

yeah, no, that's exactly it. I mean, you have to ask those kinds of questions. I mean, the usually this gets standardized in some kind of form that you'd fill out as a project manager, it's like, go to your decision gate and bring it to your project executive, fill out all this information, and they'll ask you about accounting for risk, right? But as an executive, it's your responsibility to have some idea of precisely how badly these kinds of projects can go, right? Because if you come to your decision gate for something as big and risky and frankly, unique as the Big Dig, and you say, Oh, I'm carrying about 10% of contingency or 20% of contingency. I think their number was, was, was 15% I'm not 100% on that one, like they came to the to the initial decision gate with a budget that was comically undersized, right? We know now as time travelers that this project was multiple hundreds of percents over for reasons that maybe weren't foreseeable, but they could have foreseen the fact that it would go multiple hundreds of percents over, right? So the correct budget for this project was probably that 15 billion number, right? And like all that interest servicing is driven by the schedule that you know, like the fact that the project stopped and started a bunch of times. There were a bunch of lawsuits. Like, a woman even died, you know, during a ceiling collapse in 2006 like when a three ton concrete panel fell off the roof onto her car. I mean, that's, that's tragedy and, like, that was absolutely preventable through, like, enhanced structural engineering and not building the plane while you fly it, right, right, right. So accounting for all that, sorry, Nate, go ahead.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 32:12

No, I was gonna, yeah, that's, that's a lot to account for.

Albert Brier: 32:16

It is, I mean, it is, because

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 32:19

that's my insightful moderation. Okay, go ahead, you can't

Albert Brier: 32:23

see it coming, right, yeah. But you, you can't see that specific thing coming. Royal, can see some things, some

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 32:30

something, right, yeah. And that's kind of like moving on to the next one, which is, I find, which is a really interesting one, but is the flood the gates in Venice, yeah. And that sort of this, the, could you see it coming? This is a little bit different in terms of, like, why the delays and why it went over budget, and, you know, stuff, stuff happened that was tragic, but, you know, at a on a different level,

Albert Brier: 32:59

yeah, yeah, that. It's tempting when you're talking about a project that's being executed in Italy, to be like, well, obviously the reason why it went over was because of corruption and graft and the mafia and whatnot. And you're like, come on. That's a little bit, you know, a little not racist exactly, but a little bit of a stereotype. Like, why would you do that? Like, come on. There must have been something else. No, actually, that's exactly what happened. So, you know the now, I must be said also that there's, there's a really interesting case to be made that this project should not have been built at all, right? And we can, I mean, that sounds weird. We'll get to that. But like, put a pin in that extremely controversial statement. But the point is that, you know, this project went over by about 4x right? And even those early estimates are not really clear, because there was no public bidding, no competitive public bidding on this project, zero, yeah, it was a single source to a consortium that immediately descended into bribes and padded costs and using companies that didn't really exist, and like the in 2014 an investigation done by the city revealed that there was systematic corruption that made the thing cost as much as it did and take as long as it did. And the Italian government is not famous for its ability to control costs on projects, okay, like,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 34:27

Well, and, like, just to play devil's advocate to that. I mean, like, they it is, when you talk about it is old, like the Italian like Rome, like, everything in Italy is so ancient, right, yeah. And I think in Rome, aren't they doing, there's a there's a subway, but I mean, it's like they dig a foot, and you're running into other things that have to be so yeah, I've actually

Albert Brier: 34:50

happened to that, that subway line have your own, by the way. Oh, yeah, yeah. And I've also been to the museum that they opened specifically to contain all the artifacts that they keep finding that are.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 35:00

Extracting, yeah. I mean, they're, they're dealing with, like, a level of complexity that I think in North America you just do not have, right?

Albert Brier: 35:08

You don't but, like, you know, flash back to our conversation just now on the Big Dig, and we're finding 150 year old buried infrastructure, right? I mean, that's not that different from, I mean, the the treatment of the risk is different, but the the fact that you're, like, you're digging a foot, and then you find the thing, and, well, I guess I'm stopping to deal with this now, like, that's exactly what you're dealing with in something like the the Rome Metro, which, like, having been there, I've been there a few times over the course of several years, and that thing never seems to progress. I'm telling you, like, yeah, it's, it's a wild, wild project, like it's been in in play, and it's one of those things that, like in Rome and in Italy generally, so much public money is spent on preservation and cultural stuff, right? And, of course, it is, because it's a massive tourist draw, like places like Venice. You know, if you ruin Venice, you ruin the economy of northern Italy, right? So, you know, obviously they have to, they feel like they had to really protect it. And one of the things they were trying to protect it from is, you know, sea level rise and the the impacts of climate change on the local ecosystem, and the fact that storms are getting, you know, rougher and tougher, and dumping even more sea water into the lagoon than is typically there, raising the water level. So, like, there was a flood in Venice a few years back that knocked out a number of historical buildings, and, you know, had people sheltering on top floors or buildings. That's not that uncommon there, but it is uncommon for it to happen this severely, this much, which leads me to what I was saying before. Like, they probably shouldn't have built this project. They this project. They should have built something else, right? Because they have to leave these gates closed, like most of the time.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 36:50

So let's, let's imagine, let's just go back and imagine that, you know, skip the corruption. Like, how would you set this up?

Albert Brier: 36:59

Well, it's tempting to think of this, and like an Italian politician, compared this to the moon landing, like the president of the consortium, I guess he wasn't a politician. He was one. He was part of the the consortium that built it, but he asked the question, did the Americans launch a public bid to go to the moon? And the answer is, yeah, no. But by going to the moon had literally never been done before, right? Building giant flood gates absolutely has been done before, right? I mean, and the system as it's built, it does work, like it's been activated. Like I said, it's closed more often than It's open now.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 37:37

Yeah, it's pretty wild. Like to watch it, like the videos on YouTube. Like, it's pretty, pretty interesting to watch.

Albert Brier: 37:43

Yeah, it is. It's a, it's a really unique I mean, again, I'm saying it's been done before, and then I just said it's unique. But like, you know, big, massive floodgate has been done before. This specific type of, like, floating structure has not been used for it, as my understanding, yeah. So now,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 37:57

with sea levels rising like that, apparently they have to adjust it like there's, yeah, yeah. So that's

Albert Brier: 38:03

what I mean when I'm saying, like, as a time traveler, we know that this project wasn't the right thing to suit their needs, right? Because it doesn't allow recirculation with the sea, so they have this massive algae problem. And Venice already smells terrible, I mean, so you know. And now it smells even worse, because in addition to smelling like, you know, reflux, raw sewage, it also smells like algae. So, you know, right?

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 38:22

Yes, great. Let's move on and talk about the last project that that at least we're going to discuss on this podcast. We have a lot of experience tokenish with nuclear, and so this is right up our alley. But volt voltal In the US, did

Albert Brier: 38:39

I say that? Right? Voltal volt? I think so, votal, vodal, it's spelled Vogtle.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 38:46

Like, you know, when I was from the US, like, yeah, I probably would have pronounced it the same way. And Vogtle, yeah, like, Merlot, or like, oh God, Warrior. Or you like, I can Yeah.

Albert Brier: 39:00

Foyer is again, for me, honestly, like, Yeah, I can't get behind foyer. I can't do it. It's foyer. You can say foyer. Here's a question, what is the Do you know? Do you know that piece of furniture that looks like a couch, but like the the half of the back is missing, you know? And like, maybe it has like, a short back on one side, like an armrest. That's kind of like swoopy Shays, a Shays, what lounge? It's a shades long, what it's called a chaise long.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 39:32

Okay, let's delete that. Okay, no, because absolutely not like a fool. Okay, let's, let's go back to the project. Yeah, late, late, like, tell me about this?

Albert Brier: 39:41

Yeah, so the Votel three and four is what we're talking about. Like units three and four represented the first attempt to build a new nuclear reactor in the United States in over 30 years. So as you, as you are likely aware, the Carter administration effectively killed nuclear in the Korea. Crib for reasons good and bad. Okay, yeah. Like, this is one of those, like throwing the baby out with the bathwater moments in American history, where we could have started down the road of a more responsible, more affordable version of clean energy, you know, than we currently get from the nuclear industry in the US and Canada, because we've we just threw 30 years of reactor building experience right in the garbage, and that's unfortunate. But you know, there's a nuclear renaissance now, right? There is we're trying to get more reactors built more quickly, all over the world, but in particular in North America, and this is one of the standard bearers for that nuclear renaissance, right? So what did you learn? Oh, sorry, no, please, yeah. What did we learn from that when you were doing some of your research? Well, as you might have guessed from the fact that we're including it in this episode, it didn't go great. It was, you know, two and a half X.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 40:55

How bad was it? Two and a half x is

Albert Brier: 40:58

pretty bad, delivered about seven years late. Both reactors, three and four were delivered seven years late. There was also a sister project that got canceled along the way because it wasn't deemed affordable, but that project had already spent $9 billion Wow. So in addition to the overage on voltal three and four, the VC summer project, you know, adds$9 billion dollars to that price tag you have, you know, taxpayers carrying almost an additional $30 billion versus what they thought they were. It's taxpayers and rate payers, right? Because eventually all these things are owned by like consortia, whose job is to sell electricity, and the way that they recover the cost for building, the thing is with their rates, right? So nuclear is still a high rate way to generate electricity. It's expensive.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 41:45

Yeah, it is. And some of the so the causes of the delays were like, there was a design that that existed on paper only. There were coolant pumps that had to be fixed. They had it took time. There was a bankruptcy involved, yeah, I don't know, unpack some of those and like, how would you have planned look as as a time travel? How would you have planned running the PMO for some of these what seemed like obvious delays. Now that were, you know, time travelers,

Albert Brier: 42:18

yeah, yeah. As Time Travelers, they do seem obvious. But you know, again, at the time, you know it should not have been impossible to predict that, maybe not these specific things, but something would drag your schedule down. Right? Now, there's an old saw, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, right? Right? That is true in project space. It absolutely is so when you are when you have a risk first footing for a project like this, I mean, the core thing to talk about on this project is first of a kind, right? It's building a unique, novel design that no one has ever built before, like this particular generation of reactor is like two or three generations more recent than the last one that was built in the US. So anybody, even if you did have people on the project team who had built, like a Westinghouse reactor back in the 60s, right, even if you did have those people, there's very, very few similarities, other than the fact that they both involve nuclear fission between, you know, a reactor design like that, and one like, what they were actually trying to build, which was the Westinghouse AP, 1000

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 43:27

Yeah, that's actually, you bring up a good point, which is that some of these projects are literally, like, the career of an individual, yeah. And if they, you know, if they span longer, you know, then, then the career like, what are we How do you manage that kind of risk when, when the timeline is so long that you've got new people that are coming on, you're replacing, you know, people on the team, etc. Like, how do you approach that? What are your What are your thoughts or frameworks around now, the, the first

Albert Brier: 43:58

thing to think about here is that, you know, we're talking about like rate payers and actually having to buy electricity, and that's how you make your money back on a project like this one. I think it's important to note here that any time your job when you're making a project is to sell something at the end of it, you should spend basically however much it costs to accelerate your schedule. In the case of something like this, this project clocked in seven years late, and I'd be willing to bet that a very, very large percentage of the extra cost that came along with that was driven by that schedule. I mean, for example, there were over 180 design changes that required regulatory approval submitted during the course of this project. Okay, now you know what you don't have to do change a design if you've already gotten all of those elements approved, right? Like, I'm not enough of an expert. I'm not an expert at all in the design of nuclear reactors. Okay? So I could, I couldn't tell you what all 180 design changes were in. And how many of them were valid, okay? But I can tell you that this is the sign of a project that just didn't spend enough time doing its own homework, right, right? So, you know, plus, like, the the contractor involved in building it, like I mentioned, it was a Westinghouse design. Westinghouse went bankrupt over the course of the project execution. The risk of that happening is present on every large project. Like, that's one of the things I screen for when I'm screening risk registers for quality, is I look like, Do you have a contractor insolvency risk here, right? Because it's a real problem, and it affects projects pretty dramatically, like it did this one, because this was initially priced out as a fixed price model, which literally drove the contractor bankrupt and forced the, you know, the government, to switch to what's called a Cost Plus model, right? So cost plus is basically, I have a contractor spend $1 my markup is 10% so you pay me $1.10 Right, right? So it puts all of the risk onto the owner, operator organization, and and removes all the risk from the contractor, which was the purpose of making that change, yeah. But then, you know, as somebody who is, you know, I don't have to buy my power from this particular, you know, reactor, but if I did, I'd be pretty sore about the fact that I bailed out, you know, giant electric company at my out of my own pocket, and I'm going to continue doing that for the rest of time.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 46:25

So what about the, you know, fixes, and you know, we talk about, there's coolant pumps that have to be recorded, yeah? Like, what walk me through? What was it? And then, you know, maybe, is there a way that you can, having looked at the data, say, like, how would you approach sort of planning for that and making sure that you allocated?

Albert Brier: 46:49

I'm gonna bet. I'm gonna make two bets here. Okay, I'm gonna bet. Okay, two things. One, I'm going to bet that some risk like this existed in their risk register, or at the very least in the minds of the estimators and project managers at the time, right? I will not take that bet. You shouldn't, because I'm I can basically guarantee I'm right about this. I will not take that bet major components of your project, like major technical components, failing and needing to go back to the shop for whatever reason and then come back. That is a risk. Again. That's another one that I screen for when I'm screening large project risk registers for quality. Is like, do you have, like, a procurement failure of some kind on your risk register? Is it attached to one of your major technical components? Like, are you because, like, if you don't do that, you're making unsafe assumptions about how you know solid your your your scope is. And this is a first of a kind you're kind of making it up as you go. So you really do need to, you know, hang some pretty beefy risks. So this brings me to bet number two. I bet that even though they saw this risk coming, they dramatically underestimated how much it could possibly cost them in terms of time and money, right?

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 47:57

Because, and that's probably almost impossible to predict.

Albert Brier: 48:01

It may be, you know, again, we're time travelers, so of course, we've got great insight into this right? Like we know that they needed two years to get this fix in, right, and that basically ground the project to a halt because they were already four years into construction. So, you know, they and when you have to stop a project for something that dramatic, yeah, stopping a project is really, really difficult. Yeah, restarting it is even more so.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 48:25

And I think to use your example from a couple projects back in this episode, like as an executive sponsor, you know, it's my job to sort of ask more general questions about the risk. So what happens if you know, our supply chain breaks down. What happens if these, you know, the, you know, the pieces don't all fit together? You know, I'm not going to ask you about a rate, a cooler, and I'm just going to ask you, like, do the Legos fit? Like, yeah. And what happens if they don't? Well, that whatever it

Albert Brier: 48:58

is perfect. I wish project executive ask questions like that makes that's the perfect question to ask, like, on my

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 49:04

way up. That's right, yeah, I'm gonna go from marketing into project Exec.

Albert Brier: 49:08

Pretty soon, I'm gonna be going hat in hand to Nate being like, please have some money for my project.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 49:13

And I'm rubber stamping everybody's face. I don't know what that means, approved across the forehead, approved, or worse, or denied?

Albert Brier: 49:23

Yeah, the rejected backwards, so you can see it in the mirror every morning.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 49:28

That's right. So you're so you're gonna say, so you're gonna praise me in my my elucidation,

Albert Brier: 49:33

Yeah, indeed, because it was a, it's a, it's, it's exactly the kind of question that I'm talking about. Like it's generic, but not generic enough, like, the truly generic version of that would be, sorry, it's generic, but it's not too generic, because if you take it one level of abstraction higher, then you're asking a question like, well, could it run over? And the answer is yes, right? But the way you phrased it is good for, like, driving technical conversation. So. You ask a question like that. It's like, you know, throwing something into the ring right while there's a fight going on and just watching the chaos happen. Like, you don't have to participate in the fight, you can just watch right? Yeah, but that's what your job is, to create chaos in your project team. As a project executive, like you're supposed to challenge them. You're supposed to make them think hard questions that they haven't thought of before. So if you ask them, like, what happens if all this stuff doesn't stuff doesn't fit together? I mean, if they hadn't included that risk in the risk register, of like, well, there's going to be integration failures, or a major component has to be returned and replaced. Like, by the way, the pump that came back to them. I don't know this for sure, but I'd be willing to bet that there were at least some technical differences that had knock on effects to other parts of the design, right? No doubt. Yeah. So by the time they actually got it back and started integrating, the reason why it took two years isn't because it's hard to hook a pump up, is because there was a lot of other stuff to do, right? And you don't get to a seven year delay on your schedule without having missed some of those, right, right? So asking that question early letting the knife fight get started. You know, you don't approve a project until the knife fight is over and you have a winner in the ring, right?

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 51:07

So, so what do you you've done quantitative or risk assessments before you like, you've, you know, optimized contingency that you're talking about, right? Yeah. Like, what do you think their risk register looked like in, you know, 2016

Albert Brier: 51:24

too short to numbers too small. I mean, that's,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 51:28

that's the kind of generalization that we're talking exactly.

Albert Brier: 51:31

I mean, like, if you're embarking on, okay, so good rule of thumb, if you are embarking on a project of massive complexity, your risk register should have hundreds of things in it. Okay? Over 100 is a good benchmark. So like, if somebody hands me a risk register for a make a project, and they're like, We want to spend, you know, $26 billion building a new reactor. And here's our five risks, I'm going to be like, go home, come back. When you're serious about this, you have not done your homework, you have not thought through the risks, do some research and come back when you're ready, right? Like I have a personal rule to save myself time when I'm reviewing something and that is so obviously broken that it just needs to be started from the ground up. I don't finish the review. I hand it back to people, and I say, you need to do a better job. I shouldn't have to tell you in the ways in which you are failing right now, because I'm one page into your 10 page document, I already know that you did not hit the mark, right? Yeah. So I'll give some high level notes. Ask the kinds of questions you asked, let people go back and come back. And it's amazing how risk registers. Go from 10 risks to 100 risks when you make challenges like

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 52:36

that one. Yeah, right. But here, here's the so my theory, right? Like I'm listening to you talk, and I think that the most, actually, all these projects that we've talked about, right? They, they someone confused, you know, the approvability of the project with the deliverability of the project, right? They, that's the strategic misrepresentation, right? And they, they confuse those two, you know, they built these risk registers or schedules that, just, you know, in hindsight, were unachievable or or, you know. So what is the anecdote

Albert Brier: 53:14

to that? Well, I would say, before I get into anecdote, yeah, antidote and anecdote, a story and yeah, antidote. We're telling an anecdote about antidotes.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 53:26

What's an anecdote? Albert,

Albert Brier: 53:29

well, before I go there, a good antidote, yeah. Well, thank you for restarting this for the third time. But before I go there, I want to draw a distinction here between strategic misrepresentation, right, which was definitely going on in the Big Dig to something else, like it's, it's, kind of, I wouldn't even call it it's, it's, it's evil twin, because I think strategic misrepresentation, call it evil twin, yeah, but this, but, but that's the evil twin. The more benign twin is optimism bias, right? Yes, and we've talked about optimism bias a lot on this show before. But just to quickly recap, optimism bias is the feeling that you know your team, you as a manager, you as an estimator, whatever you're just going to do better than the last guys, right? That's that's what it means. So it is your belief that you can do better, and that's a great thing to have. Like that strong belief in your in your team's ability to achieve success is great, but it shouldn't translate to your numbers. Okay, you should manage your team in an optimistic from an optimistic perspective, from an optimistic footing, like, manage them like they are rock stars. But, you know, a rock stars need a lot of maintenance, and you that doesn't mean that you're going to, you know, the average project performs averagely, and the average project goes way, way over. So why would you think that you're going to be better than that? You won't be right, right, like there's and the more unique your project is, the more time has passed since last time it was done. The fewer members of your team have built one of these things before, the higher those chances are that your optimistic estimate is going to be not just wrong, but dead wrong to the tune of hundreds of percent right,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 55:10

and that, that is the cure, folks,

Albert Brier: 55:13

that's the cure. Yeah, you have to dial that optimism bias back right, and you have to control for it like the the UK has a published estimating manuals that are pretty darn good. And the the green book is kind of like the the colloquial name for the estimating guidelines there. So they released a supplement specifically to combat optimism bias that has a lot of really interesting data in it. But it basically boils down to like, you're adding 100% to most project estimates early on. Like, if Votel comes back to me and says, you know, hey, 14 billion bucks, we're going to get this thing done. You know, I don't have to think for a moment before I say, like, Nope, it's 28 billion. Go back, sharpen your pencils. Figure out why it's 28 billion. When I'm convinced that you've got your arms around this, then we'll talk. Right? Yep. So the first blush estimate, especially if you can look at contingency numbers and see them as a percent, like they're 10 or lower. For a project like this one, you just don't approve it. You just don't, you can't, right, no, and like, it's also really tempting to focus this conversation, as we have, on cost. But as I mentioned before, like, most common driver for cost increase is schedule extension surprise. So you've really got to think hard about your schedule too, and the schedule risks, right? Like the timeline, if it's going to stay, you know, fixed in stone, your cost is going to be astronomical. You need some schedule contingency in there to absorb the very predictable delays that are going to happen on a first of a kind project, yeah.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 56:47

All right, Albert, let's wrap up. What's your one piece of advice for that executive sponsor who's looking at sort of that first estimate, you know that first blush, schedule.

Albert Brier: 57:02

My piece of advice for them is one I've given on this show before, and that is, Do not be afraid of the big number. Okay, like your choice as an executive isn't small number versus big number. It's big number now versus bigger number later. Those are your two actual choices, right? All the projects we discuss, like the Opera House, the Big Dig, the Venice, flood barrier, voters, three and four, they all have something in common, which is that they are unique in their time, right? So if you are an executive and you are looking at a unicorn, do not confuse it for a horse.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 57:39

Okay, that's the that's the advice, folks,

Albert Brier: 57:42

that's the advice. Lady unicorn, it's not a horse, right?

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 57:47

We also, you mentioned some interest in, just to add to that too, you your pointed advice about asking the general, but not like, super general questions, to start to have some of that. You know, technical conversations to spark that conversation is a really good takeaway for, yeah, yeah, for our listeners, right?

Albert Brier: 58:10

I mean, to me, if you're a project executive, it's almost, it's almost your responsibility to say no, right? It's, it's the first thing that you get from your project team. I mean, the data tells us that project teams are really, really awful at generating a first pass estimate early in the project right? Every single bit of published data from the UK Green Book, supplement about optimism bias that I mentioned earlier, to the AAC e cost estimating guidelines, to every single bank of published historical data you can imagine, including, again, Ben flybergs. That's an appendix to how big things get done. He's got a cost appendix there that says, Buy industry. Here's how much things go over. Guess what? There's very few of them that are in single digits. Okay, so when you are talking about a first blush estimate as an executive, you probably don't even have to open the envelope and see the number before you just say, like, Nope, it's too low. But you haven't even seen our number yet. It's like, but I know it's too low, exactly. So, you know, I guess that's my second piece of advice for executives, is say no more. Yeah, right. Like, it's good advice. Start the knife fight. Be don't be afraid to say no. Like, force your teams to spend more time figuring things out. Right? Number does not go down. Number goes up. Guys. Yeah, so that's true.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 59:30

Well, that was a good that was good conversation, man. I love the the insights on the past projects and yeah, it's easy to be a time traveler and sort of look back, but then it's, you know, let's, let's talk about how it could have gone better. But, yeah, it was super interesting. Like, you know, everything

Albert Brier: 59:48

old is new again. Shoot, right. We're gonna, there's, there's gonna be more big, you know, splashy construction projects. There's gonna be more big tunnels to replace elevated highways. There's gonna be more flood barriers. And there's definitely going to be more nuclear so there are lessons to be taken away from our time travel experience here.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 1:00:05

You know, before we go, I want to rehash that survey a little bit. Yes, please talk about our goal is to get to know you our listeners, right? We, I don't know if I told you this, but we, we have passed a milestone. Apparently, we have 500 downloads now, okay, all right, look at us and and we have lasted for over a year, which less than 15% of podcasts I read last that long. So you know, kudos, right?

Albert Brier: 1:00:33

Yeah, absolutely. That's a milestone, and we want to celebrate that milestone by with you early all of our planning work to you, yeah,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 1:00:41

what I really want to talk about is you can we want you to participate in a survey. We want to get to know you. We're going to run a survey, short, sweet, it's going to find out who you are, what you do, where you do it, who you do it for. We'd love some feedback on our discussion, maybe some ideas and topics for the future to address. As Albert said, we want to offload the planning for future episodes to you

Albert Brier: 1:01:06

our listeners. Yeah, yeah. And as part of that, we are going to ask you to, you know, come up with a question or two for us, right? That's right. We are going to start including a Q and A component to each of these episodes. Or when we have a critical mass of questions, we'll throw one in there. But we want to understand what you what kinds of questions you'd like us to address. Like, you know, our style now, like, we've got a year. I'm sure you got everybody who's listening this far into the podcast is probably a fan of podcasts in general. And probably this one too,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 1:01:39

yeah, and my neighbor, and my neighbor. Hey, Dave, so.

Albert Brier: 1:01:43

And also another shout out to my dad. Hey, Dad, yeah. But, you know, we want to hear from the Dave's and dad's of the world, like, what kinds of questions would you like us

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 1:01:53

to answer? And and the project managers, the, you know, the other PMO directors, like, give us, give us a give Albert, the hard one. I'm just here to moderate. I'm the haha funny guy.

Albert Brier: 1:02:03

Yeah, throw some softballs to Nate. Yeah. And then, like, what do you do for fun, Nate? And then Bert. Like, why are you so confident that you could do vodal Three better?

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 1:02:12

Yes, exactly. I'll take the easy ones. So we're gonna, we're gonna post a link to the survey in the show notes. Please. You know, participate, you know, give us your honest feedback. We're gonna also have, like, a subscribe so we can start to, you know, maybe initiate more conversations, you know, with our listeners off the podcast. I don't know what I'm trying to say, Albert, but yeah, we just want to, we want to communicate with you more, more often,

Albert Brier: 1:02:43

so places where we find you, so places like we're about to start doing a little bit more with Reddit, right? That's right. So we're going to be spending more time kind of engaging with our community where we find them. So LinkedIn, Reddit are the two big ones. We may go with other places now, but as always, you can find updates about the show on LinkedIn and on riskyplanner.com that's right. So you know, look there for the survey. We'll have we'll be annoying you with links before you know it.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 1:03:14

So that's right. All right, thanks for listening, everybody. Thanks, Albert, yeah.

Albert Brier: 1:03:19

Thank you, Nate. And thanks to everybody in advance for filling out that survey and asking us. Survey and asking us some amazing questions, some easy ones for Nate

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 1:03:26

and some hard ones for me. Definitely. All right, till next time. See you next time.

Albert Brier: 1:03:30

Bye. Hey everybody. It's Albert here. Thanks for tuning in to the risky planner podcast. We hope today's conversation was informative and above all else, inspires you to excellence in what you do. If you liked today's episode, don't forget to rate, subscribe and leave a review. It helps us reach more listeners just like you. I'd also like to thank Thompson Igbo Igbo for letting us use his excellent music on our show. If you like what you hear, check him out@igbomusic.com that's E, G, B, O music.com talk to you later. You