Is stigma hindering a more modular approach to project management?

“Two out of three ain’t bad”, as those of a certain age will recall Meatloaf singing in 1977. Perhaps he was a project manager in another life – because, when it comes to the iron triangle of budget, scope and schedule, too many projects still end up missing at least one of the crucial trio of targets.

One promising approach aimed at beating Meatloaf’s score and improving the chances of a hat-trick is modular project management – based on the premise of breaking down large projects into multiple smaller and more manageable pieces and making each of those elements as standardised and repeatable as possible (it’s discussed at greater length in the autumn 2024 issue of Project journal).

What’s holding it back?

Despite having roots that stretch back to the 18th Century (with roadbuilders, although agile software engineers may argue for a more recent origin), modularity remains more talked about than actually adopted for most mainstream projects and project managers. This is despite it having a number of high-profile champions, including Professor Bent Flyvbjerg of Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, and mounting real-world evidence of its effectiveness.

Could something as basic as an image problem be one of the things that is holding modularity back? Joseph Harrison, Teaching Fellow and Doctoral Researcher at the University of Bath’s School of Management, certainly thinks so.

“There is a stigma when we think of modular projects,” he says, chiefly driven by inaccurate stereotypes such as prefab emergency houses that were thrown up after the Second World War. “Modular brings up connotations of cheap and poor-quality construction methods, although in reality that could not be further from the truth.”

Plug and play

Ironically, despite being lambasted by critics at the time, prefabs were in many ways highly successful projects. They did exactly what they were designed to do – provide quick, sanitary and inexpensive temporary housing for thousands of bombed-out citizens with nowhere else to live. (Some of the last remaining prefabs became Grade II listed in the noughties.)

Where modularity is applied, it often seems to come from the ground up rather than the top down, and so is limited to discrete pieces of a larger project, rather than the whole thing. Thus Crossrail, while reliant on a great deal of bespoke design, did employ some modular aspects – standardised components, such as platforms, for example, that were adjustable so they could be fitted in multiple locations, and modular ‘plug and play’ station tech packages designed to be readily upgradable in future.

Mark Wild, drafted in as the CEO to ‘rescue’ Crossrail in 2018, is on record as saying that the project’s troubles might have been greatly reduced had it been more fundamentally modular from the get-go.

Forego the hero approach

Status – or rather a perceived lack of it – may also dog the adoption of modularity, especially on large, high-profile flagship projects where it could potentially be of greatest benefit. A nation’s pride – or the pride of its leaders – may dictate a bespoke approach. How much more glamorous is it to forge heroically ahead and attempt to build the biggest/fastest/longest thing ever, rather than to pause and ask cautiously how to break such an indigestible meal down into more readily managed and less risky bites?

Of course, the risk is that heroism is later revealed as hubris, when the same project is mired in complexity, bust budgets and delays. Only then does the appeal of modularity – standardised, replicable, consistent – re-emerge.

Keep it in context

One of the keys to overcoming these emotional, rather than rational, roadblocks is to take another leaf out of Meatloaf’s book and avoid one-hit wonders. Win or lose, projects shouldn’t exist in a vacuum, and the lessons passed down to future projects and project managers – whether about modularity or otherwise – are some of the most important, yet often-overlooked, success factors.

See the autumn 2024 issue of Project journal for an in-depth look at modularity in project management.