Dealing with high changing regulatory environments: action and re-action in megaproject performance management

Rather than bringing certainty to megaprojects, regulations can produce overflows. They bring surprise to megaproject management and therefore it is doubtful whether initially stated cost, time and quality objectives will be good indicators of project success. Given that megaprojects take many years to accomplished, regulations may not be stable over megaprojects’ construction life. Regulations may be appropriate as they take into consideration new political objectives but this very fact also changes the parameters of the megaproject. Therefore, its time, cost and quality will also change. As regulations are dynamic there may be a limit to which the initial planning parameters are legitimate benchmarks for the actualised construction’s cost, time and quality. It follows that megaproject’s success can result in a virtuous exercise of orchestrating actions and re-actions which involve both the capability of envisioning and pursuing boundaries and of demolishing them.