A few days ago, I talked about the smallest PPP in the world. It’s in Poland. 12.000€. Probably quite unknown. There are another one… this time famous. Small building. Small investment. Small transaction costs. Sorry. That last one was a joke. Scotland. 2002 Audit Scotland reviewed six school PFI projects. For Glasgow, it reported around £12 million in combined public and private sector set-up and advisory costs. Against £212 million in construction. For West Lothian? Around £2 million....
1 day ago • 1 min read
Before you tell a difficult public client: “You can’t do this without me.” Consider a small building in Sydney. White roof. Quite photogenic. You may have seen it. February 1966. Jørn Utzon, the architect of the small building, met the NSW Minister for Public Works, Davis Hughes. There were unpaid fees. A dispute over funding for prototypes. And a relationship that had already gone thoroughly to hell. Utzon threatened to quit. Hughes replied: “You are always threatening to quit...” And both...
3 days ago • 2 min read
Now that it’s time of elections… let’s talk about important meetings. Well… maybe you remember who was Schabowski. Some people leave a meeting with action items. Günter Schabowski left one with a border crisis. Berlin. 9 November 1989. Schabowski was giving a press conference about new travel rules for East Germans. He had received the document shortly beforehand. He hadn’t read it carefully. Excellent preparation… that I truly recommend for you. Then came a perfectly reasonable question:...
4 days ago • 1 min read
You probably know it. 1999 NASA lost the Mars Climate Orbiter. One team supplied data in English units. The other expected metric. The spacecraft travelled for nine months before the mistake became everybody’s problem. That is a very long journey to discover you needed one awkward conversation. Now, I’m not suggesting you’re about to lose a spacecraft. Your project or your job has its own ways of making you miserable. You sit in a meeting. Someone says, “The contractor has accepted that...
5 days ago • 1 min read
A few of you have complained that the prices of some courses in The Room have gone up. And that The Room itself costs more now. Yes. That’s true. Look. The feedback I keep getting is that I’m practically giving away 20 years of PPP experience for peanuts. So I’ve decided to make the peanuts slightly more expensive. As I say on every course page, prices will never go down. They can only go up. And look… they already have. If you’re already inside The Room, your price is yours for life. If you...
6 days ago • 1 min read
For the last few days, I’ve been watching PAW Patrol: The Movie with my son… Several times. You know… school holidays… At this point, I could write the technical due diligence report without using my notes. An idiot becomes mayor of Adventure City. His first infrastructure idea? Put a loop in the metro line. A loop. For a train full of people. On the first trip, logically the train gets stuck upside down and everyone needs to be rescued. It seems someone forgot to calculate that a train is...
7 days ago • 1 min read
I’m going to China in a few days. Suppliers. Factories. Meetings. And plenty of opportunities to discover that what I thought I knew was wrong. Preferably before transferring any money. In big infrastructure projects, that timing matters rather a lot. Take Brisbane’s Clem7 tunnel. In April 2010, its operator announced that 1.24 million vehicle trips had been made through the tunnel during its first three weeks. Almost 59,000 a day. Lovely numbers. But meaningless… If you stopped at that...
8 days ago • 2 min read
Look at this story told to me by Muhammad Danish, a top expert in PPP... Pakistan. A road to be built. A few years ago. Inflation was running wild. Prices were changing so fast that a contractor could buy materials on Monday and regret being born by Thursday… until he discovered he could sell them for a fortune on Sunday. The government’s advisers saw the problem. If the private partner had to carry all the price escalation risk, the bids would be absurdly expensive. Or there would be no bids...
9 days ago • 1 min read
“No fee paid upfront.” “If you can bring equity capital of $45 million, then we can talk about success fees.” Wonderful. You bring the project. I bring the investors. The contacts. The credibility. The hours. And the working capital to finance my own involvement in your adventure. Then, if everything works, we can talk about paying me. Not pay me. Talk about it. Beautiful little detail. Look. I have nothing against success fees. I do work on success. But think about it. Working entirely at...
10 days ago • 2 min read