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Comment by jen729w | Hacker News Reader

Similar story: I asked a friend, who ran public comms on a rail extension project, to see her schedule.

Two Fridays away at 11:05 a concrete truck turns up and pours. At 13:10 something is laid by some specialist in the concrete. At 14:50 another thing happens.

I asked her if she was joking and she looked at me like I was mad. Of course not. The concrete needs to be poured and then the truck goes somewhere else. When it hardens a thing has to happen and then the guy who checks the thing turns up and they’ve only got him for half a day and so on and so forth.

My mate says that “if they built bridges like we built IT infrastructure a lot more people would die”.

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My mate says that “if they built bridges like we built IT infrastructure a lot more people would die”.

If people regularly died because of IT infrastructure, we'd be regulated and licensed like civil engineers and we certainly wouldn't be writing software in C/C++/nodejs. We'd all be coding in stuff like Ada and Erlang and most of our day wouldn't involve writing logic at all - it would involve filling out documentation and forms around the occasional bit of logic that would get written, probably by someone else.

Have you heard about this newfangled GDPR thing? You comment kind of reminds me of that

Did you ask her what happens if the concrete truck gets stuck in an accident on the freeway?

They send another truck because of the first one didn’t make it in time the concrete company is going to have a fun day cleaning stuck concrete out of their truck.

My father-in-law was in commercial construction for decades, now turned general contracting post 2008 recession, and he has binder and binders of contractor business cards, including a concrete section. I can assure you project managers would be frantically calling all concrete companies trying to find a replacement. And they will.

If it's a railway project they have likely booked several trucks already, doing several deliveries, so one of them having an accident is not likely to matter.

Forgive me if I’m wrong — I have a sibling comment here and am not a construction PM — but no. This comment beautifully demonstrates the point: the disconnect between our industry and the physical world.

There are not just concrete trucks just lined up down the road, waiting for a PM to say “okay we’ve got enough, you can stop now”.

The amount of concrete is known. It is planned. The 3rd party concrete supplier is given an order well ahead of time. They plan their trucks and drivers. None of this is made up on the day.

One of them having an accident matters.

This is why IT projects are such a shambles. When we forget something — a change request, say — we just say “oh well, that’s a pity”. Some poor schmuck has a bad afternoon running around making it good and life goes on. We get away with it because it isn’t concrete in a truck.

You might be overlooking into what I wrote.

One truck can deliver about 8 m3 of concrete. If you need 100 m3, that's about 12 deliveries.

This can be done if 4 trucks make 3 deliveries each, or if 3 trucks make 4 deliveries each. The supplier has several trucks and while each one needs maintenance rarely, the fleet of them needs maintenance almost daily, so the supplier is likely to either over-provision (have a spare truck), or be able to procure one from his competitor across the street. "One of the trucks having an accident" is already planned in on the supplier level.

Ah, I get you. Apologies.

I did not, but now that I know more about project management — PMP® specifically — I can probably answer that for you.

Risk management. Which in the real world actually means something, unlike those horribly pointless risk workshops your PM makes you turn up to.

The work package that contained the concrete truck would have assigned to it a risk. These risks have been carefully thought out ahead of time. I dare say in the building industry they re-use them. What an idea! Learning from your past. Anyway.

So the risk here is that ‘the truck gets stuck in an accident’, and that risk has a rating. An amount of money is assigned as a reserve to this risk in the event that it happens. This money is part of the project’s budget but ideally you never spend it. But it’s there.

So if the bad thing happens — freeway accident — the PM pulls out their risk register, looks it up, calls the boss, says “hey that risk eventuated, we need to use that reserve”, the funds are released, and the risk mitigation is initiated.

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