Journal article 2023
Management Decision Vol. 61, No. 13 · pp. 413–424
Infrastructure success cannot be judged only at project completion: value, social costs and sustainability impacts change across stakeholders, geographies and time horizons long after delivery.
Cost, time and scope remain essential measures of project delivery, but they are too narrow to explain whether an infrastructure ultimately succeeds. This article reframes infrastructure success around the value created and destroyed for different stakeholders, including end-users and local communities, and around contribution to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. It develops a practical action plan for bringing those wider considerations into front-end infrastructure decision-making.
How should decision-makers assess and plan infrastructure success beyond the traditional cost, time and scope criteria?
The article is a conceptual and practitioner-oriented contribution grounded in project-management and infrastructure literature and illustrated through infrastructure examples. It contrasts the traditional iron triangle with a broader social-value and SDG perspective, then translates that perspective into a seven-step action plan for decision-makers. The plan emphasizes external-stakeholder engagement, design iteration and assessment of costs and value across different actors and time horizons.
Cost, time and scope are important for the temporary project organization, but they capture only a fraction of infrastructure success. Infrastructure can be late or over budget and still create major long-term value, while apparently successful delivery can impose substantial costs on external stakeholders.
Infrastructure creates and destroys value differently for owners, contractors, users, local communities, taxpayers and other groups. These effects also evolve from project delivery through years or even decades of operation, making success a dynamic and multi-stakeholder concept.
The seven-step action plan combines stakeholder engagement, social-value assessment, SDG trade-offs and iterative design. It explicitly includes external stakeholders, including minorities and more vulnerable community members, before detailed design and construction lock in major choices.
The article offers a practical bridge between the long-running academic critique of the iron triangle and actual infrastructure decision-making. It reframes project success as a question of long-term value creation, distribution and sustainability rather than only short-term delivery performance.
For infrastructure owners, policymakers and project managers, the action plan provides a structured way to expose trade-offs early, identify groups whose value may be destroyed, compare alternative designs and preserve attention to social and environmental outcomes throughout the project lifecycle.
Locatelli, G., Paravano, A., Terenzi, M., & Trucco, P. (2023). Yes, construction cost, time and scope are important, but there is more: a new action plan for infrastructure success. Management Decision, 61(13), 413–424. https://doi.org/10.1108/MD-04-2022-0516
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