Assessed, not assumed
Most options assessments start with the answer already in them.
Not deliberately. Nobody sits down to rig a business case. It happens earlier and more quietly than that...in a line drawn on a plan, in a project name, in a sentence in a brief that everyone reads past.
By the time the options assessment begins, the decision has usually already been made. What follows is the paperwork that makes it defensible.
Like many infrastructure business case practitioners, we have been on both sides of this. Either writing briefs or getting paid to notice!
Three ways a decision gets pre-cooked
In our mind there are three ways decisions get made early...am sure there are more but these are the three we often see:
The drawing: Someone marks up a plan to show an idea. A vehicle access hatched over, a corridor sketched in, a site shaded for a future use. It's indicative. Everyone knows it's indicative. Then it gets copied into the next document, and the one after that, and eighteen months later it is a decision that nobody remembers making and no one can point to a decision-maker for.
The test is simple: can anyone name who approved it, and when? If not, it isn't a constraint. It's a habit.
The name: Call something the Northern Bypass Business Case and you have already decided there is a bypass and it goes north. The mode, the alignment and half the problem definition are baked in before anyone has written a word. I've seen more options assessments constrained by their own project title than by any technical finding.
The data nobody owns: This is the quiet one and increasing in the current digital world. An assessment concludes a site is serviced, and the conclusion rests on a network capacity figure that came from a model, which came from a dataset, which came from an organisation that no longer maintains it and would not warrant it if you asked.
Nobody has done anything wrong. But the number is now load-bearing, and there is no one underneath it.
Why this is imporant
In the Tuvalu Transportation Study we assessed a new airport alongside inter-island sea connections. It would have been easy - and cheaper - to treat the airport as the project and the sea connections as context. The question we were actually asked was which combination served the country best. Those are different questions and they have different answers.
On the Doha Metro, part of the work was a strategic assessment of thirty-three stations. Some of those station locations arrived with a great deal of momentum behind them. Momentum is not evidence. Testing a location that everyone assumes is settled is uncomfortable, occasionally unpopular, and it is the entire reason an independent adviser is in the room.
The cost of getting this wrong is not usually a bad project. It is a project that is fine, delivered at a price nobody compared to anything, solving a problem nobody restated.
So that brings us back to the key question...What to do about it?
If you write briefs, say the quiet part out loud. Four words are enough: this is to be assessed, not assumed. State explicitly which elements of your markup are indicative and which are fixed, and who fixed them. It costs you a sentence and it buys you a genuine options assessment rather than a confirmation exercise.
If you answer briefs, ask the awkward question during clarifications rather than after award. "Is this a constraint or a preference?" is a fair question, it is cheap to ask, and the answer changes your scope. Asking it later looks like scope creep. Asking it early looks like competence.
If you're commissioning an assessment, ask one thing when it lands: which of these conclusions would change if the input data turned out to be wrong, and who owns that data? An assessment that cannot answer that is not ready to spend money on, however good it looks.
Now the uncomfortable bit
Independent advice is only worth paying for when it is capable of coming back with an answer you did not want.
That is easy to agree with in principle and hard to sit through in practice - for the client, who has usually already told someone which way this is going, and for the adviser, who would like to be invited back.
But the value of an options assessment is entirely contained in the possibility that it changes the answer. Remove that and you have bought a very expensive document.
Assessed, not assumed. It's a low bar. It is remarkable how often we step over it!!!
Till next time Andrew
Andrew Collings is the founder of KA Advisory, an infrastructure advisory practice working across New Zealand, Australia, the Gulf and the Pacific. He sits on the Executive Board of World Pentathlon (UIPM) and is President of the Oceania Modern Pentathlon Confederation.
Transit Trends · Andrew Collings, KA Advisory. Read and comment on the original on LinkedIn.
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