History of Project Management

I bet you could make a good business book out of the Gulag history I’m reading. A project to construct an 806-mile railroad and a port makes a good case study. You could talk about the planning mistakes, the stifling of dissent, whether and when the management team began to realize that their project had gone horribly wrong, and the political issues in that prevented them from quitting sooner — until, in fact, their boss had died. It would be a feel-good business hit, since everything is better-managed than the Gulag!

The decision to start building [the railway from the Vorkuta region to the Arctic Sea] was taken by the Soviet government in April 1947. A month later, exploration, surveying work, and construction all began simultaneously. Prisoners also began building a new seaport at the Kamenny cape, where the Ob River widens out toward the sea…
By the end of the summer… the surveying team had established that the Kamenny cape was a poor location for the port…. The Soviet leadership determined to move the site, and the railway, too… Construction proved nearly impossible in the Arctic tundra. As winter permafrost turned quickly into summer mud, track had to be constantly prevented from bending or sinking. Even so, wagons frequently came off the rails. Because of supply problems, the prisoners began using wood instead of steel in the railway construction, a decision which guaranteed the project’s failure. At the time of Stalin’s death in 1953, 310 miles had been build from one end of the railway, 124 miles from the other end [out of 806 required]. The port existed only on paper. Within weeks of Stalin’s funeral, the entire project, which had cost 400 billion rubles and tens of thousands of lives, was abandoned for good.