Channel Tunnel
General Summary
This study involves the Channel Tunnel which is a tunnel that essentially links links Great Britain and France and is the worlds largest privatized project. The project was massive with over 600,000 shareholders and a 14.5 billion dollar price tag. A project this massive, even if every aspect of the project went as planned would still require a strong project team. In this case there were allot of changes made along the way by various parties, along with two different countries and governments that had two different standards that seemed to complicate the project. While this was an engineering marvel it also was one of the biggest private financial failures.
There was definitely conflict between TML and Eurotunnel. A course of action that could have been taken to prevent the conflict is committing more time to the planning phase of the project. Also it seems that the project cost and scope was not planned sufficiently.
I am not sure how you could prevent changes, other than better planning. But, a good project manager has a good risk management plan in place, so when things are out of whack or risks occur they can be fixed in a timely fashion and the impact is not as great. You essentially will do this by going through the proper risk management process: identification, quantification, development and control.
The owner of the project is to make sure that the objective to the project is clear and all objectives are laid out in order to have a successful project, to see that the technical specifications are in place for the best performance. Also the owner has to be able to fund or find funding for the project, assist in creating unity, approve changes, and resolve issues. As mentioned in the article since a project of this size had never been performed, they should of not had a fixed rate on equipment. Which makes sense; it is very hard to gauge