A guide to using the power of design flexibility to improve the performance of complex technological projects, for designers, managers, users, and analysts. Project teams can improve results by recognizing that the future is inevitably uncertain and that by creating flexible designs they can adapt to eventualities. This approach enables them to take advantage of new opportunities and avoid harmful losses. Designers of complex, long-lasting projects—such as communication networks, power plants, or hospitals—must learn to abandon fixed specifications and narrow forecasts. They need to avoid the “flaw of averages,” the conceptual pitfall that traps so many designs in underperformance. Failure to allow for changing circumstances risks leaving significant value untapped. This book is a guide for creating and implementing value-enhancing flexibility in design. It will be an essential resource for all participants in the development and operation of technological systems: designers, managers, financial analysts, investors, regulators, and academics. The book provides a high-level overview of why flexibility in design is needed to deliver significantly increased value. It describes in detail methods to identify, select, and implement useful flexibility. The book is unique in that it explicitly recognizes that future outcomes are uncertain. It thus presents forecasting, analysis, and evaluation tools especially suited to this reality. Appendixes provide expanded explanations of concepts and analytic tools.

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This technical note shows how designers of infrastructure systems can evaluate flexibility in engineering systems in fairly simple ways. Specifically, it illustrates a spreadsheet approach to valuing "real options" in a project. The model avoids complex financial procedures, which are both inappropriate for most design issues and constitute barriers to understanding and thus achieving the substantial improvement in performance that real options enable. The spreadsheet approach uses standard procedures; is based on data available in practice; and provides graphics that explain the results intuitively. It should thus be readily accessible to practicing professionals responsible for engineering design and management. A practical application to the design of a parking garage demonstrates the ease of use and presentation of results of this approach.

This note describes a simple procedure for assessing utility functions which avoids many difficulties of the standard techniques. The conventional methods suffer from at least three drawbacks; they (1) generate utility functions that depend on the probability levels used; (2) chain responses from one question to the next, so that any bias is propagated and even magnified; and (3) change ranges and reference points constantly, introducing range effects and other distortions. Noting the evidence linking the dependence of utility functions on the “certainty effect,” our method: (1) compares lotteries with other lotteries rather than certain amounts; (2) does not “chain” responses; and (3) consistently uses “elementary lotteries” which control for range and reference points. Experimental work supports the proposed procedure.