The pressure is always on when community demand drives a major project. Expectations are high, anticipation builds, and every misstep hits the front page.

As a former public service chief audit executive, I’ve reviewed more than my share of large-scale initiatives, and all too often they fall into the same traps: delivering what’s feasible versus what’s needed, and relying on oversight that tracks progress, but fails to halt problems.

Below are three recent municipal projects in North America that offer critical lessons to learn for future projects.

When Ambition Outpaces Demand

Columbus, Ohio, received $40 million from the federal government as part of a nation-wide competition to develop “smart city” capabilities. What began as a collection of 15 different project aims became consolidated into nine, with the goal of increasing access to and facilitating mobility for communities.

While this included some back-office operations such as modernizing data collection, it also involved some forward-facing initiatives, such as “smart mobility hubs,” physical spaces that were intended to bring together transit, ride-hailing, and taxis. It also included the development of three new apps, and new features added to an existing app. Another citizen user experience came in the form of the “connected vehicle environment,” which enabled cars to “talk” to each other to warn of blind spots, incoming collisions, etc.

Uptake on the new services was not brisk. While the project had the unfortunate luck to launch shortly before COVID, post-lockdown data did not demonstrate a successful initiative.

The connected vehicle was adopted by only 1,000 vehicles, with only 60% of those users recommending the service to others. The flagship user app, named “Pivot,” was downloaded only 1,100 times, resulting in 447 trips; another app, designed to offer pregnant women trips for medical purposes, was used by only 143 people. And the smart mobility hubs resulted in the planning of only eight (not 800) trips.

While there were back-office infrastructure gains that citizens might not see, it became clear that the served communities did not gain from any meaningful improvement in access to transportation.

Public Safety Without Public Trust

In 2021, the construction of a new Atlanta Public Safety Training Center was announced, an 85-acre facility with a price tag of approximately $115 million.

This new compound was intended to modernize police training, and offer tools and training methods not previously available to them. But while the name of the project sounds fairly innocuous, public reception to the facility has been anything but. 

Since nicknamed “Cop City,” protests have not only been numerous, but occasionally violent. Dozens of people have been arrested, some charged with domestic terrorism, and one protestor was even fatally shot by police in a confrontation. Some protestors have attacked police with fireworks, rocks, and even Molotov cocktails.

On top of the protests, a call for a referendum on the construction failed in November 2024. Protestors call the process undemocratic; lawmakers call the new facility essential to modern policing.

The project was meant to increase capability for an important public service. Instead, it has reinforced divides between the municipality and the community it serves.

A Transit Plan Derailed by Shifting Priorities

Moving north of the border, Ottawa, Canada, launched a city-wide light rail transit system in 2019, replacing an extensive bus network with dedicated transitways.

While construction had begun six years earlier, a plan had actually been adopted and funded in the early 2000s, and then cancelled in 2006 and replaced with a different plan in 2008 (forcing a financial settlement with the original builder for approximately $25 million). The two plans served different areas of the city, and the “new” plan was further adjusted in 2011 and again in 2012 to simultaneously reduce costs and increase access to different communities.

After almost exactly five years of construction, the contractor missed three handover requirements, delaying the project by over a year. When the city declared the train in service, they did so knowing that the trains did not pass a single error-free testing run, a contract term that the city waived due to increasing frustration from the public.

Service was launched in September, and in October there were issues with train doors paralyzing the network, as well as onboard computer malfunctions flooding in the stations. After daily delays of 30 minutes or more, the city was forced to put dozens of buses back on the road to make up for the lost capacity, and eventually an official inquiry was launched to understand how it all went wrong so badly.

Needs Analysis Isn’t a Checkbox — It’s the Foundation

A needs analysis is a crucial element of any innovation project. Performed objectively, widely, and rigorously, a structured data collection can add much-needed alterations to high-level strategies.

While consultation is a standard component of virtually every municipal initiative, teams must always ask themselves: how much impact does the feedback have on the official plans? Is the strategy homing in on community need, or does it merely call for a different-colored paint?

The above examples highlight just how important it is for municipal governments to first ensure there is a need for the new service before rolling it out.

Columbus certainly hit some bad luck with the onset of COVID, but with a pre-existing private sector fight for on-demand transportation (Uber, Waymo, existing taxis, etc.), did citizens want to download another app? Did the marketplace demand another option, or did policy makers decide that there should be another option without supporting data?

Ottawa’s decision to build light rail certainly wasn’t a revolutionary concept, as hundreds of cities around the world have similar options. So it could be reasonably argued that they weren’t forcing a “need” on their community.

But which communities needed it? And did that demand drive the planning, or did the funding force those decisions?

Engagement Is More Than Talking To Stakeholders

Bound to the needs analysis is the notion of stakeholder management. Nominally, consultations can again “tick this box,” but project teams always need to question whether or not they are staying true to the purpose of the consultations: to gain buy-in from the communities.

Will any municipality ever gain 100% buy-in? Doubtful.

But when protests such as those in Atlanta actually become violent, it’s fair to say that community support is nowhere near enough.

Columbus’s lack of engagement should have told the local government that their stakeholder management efforts were insufficient. Did enough people even know about the service, or know how it could benefit them?

Ottawa’s lack of stakeholder management might have been the most damaging, at least from a monetary perspective. The construction might have had legitimate delays that could have been better understood by their citizens, or perhaps the original timeline had been unrealistic—or maybe even some combination of the two.

Whatever the cause, the public unease about the constant delays instilled a panic in the local government, who then launched a new kind of train without any substantive (contractually bound) testing. And that failed to deliver the most basic of stakeholder expectations: a new service that actually worked.

Governance Requires Judgment, Not Just Structure

Sitting above all of these issues is governance over the projects.

Speaking from experience of auditing many of many of these types of initiatives, I can honestly say that determining effective governance can be a difficult task.

Most governance structures can show clear hierarchies of decision-making, along with oversight committees that sit regularly and take excellent meeting minutes.

But what governance ultimately comes down to is: did the project deliver what was intended? If not, was it due to some unavoidable issue (an “act of god”)? In most cases, if the answers to these simple questions are both “no,” then a breakdown in decision-making has occurred—and that, in the end, is the answer to the effectiveness question.

Bold, ambitious projects can most certainly deliver the bold kinds of change that communities want and deserve.

But when thinking big, project teams need to stay grounded. And, remember that sometimes the basics of project management will form the launching pad that these moon shots require.