Apple’s $5B project management masterclass

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear Apple?

The iPod, the iPhone, or maybe the recent Vision Pro?

Either way, I doubt it’s project management. But Apple has pulled off a couple of project miracles in recent times.

The biggest one is not the device you’re using to read this email. Nope. It’s this $5B megaproject:

I recently read a bunch about how it came to life. It’s a decade-long story full of eccentric details that you’d expect from a project with Steve Jobs at the helm.

But that’s not what we’re here for.

There is a project management masterclass hiding in how this project was built. And while there are no exact numbers reported, it’s largely accepted to be delivered on time and within its $5B budget.

So, how did they do that…?

The answer might surprise you.

Lego.

You see, Steve, his team at Apple, and the team of architects at Foster + Partners understood something. They knew that most megaprojects like these fail miserably. They’re late, go over budget, or both.

So they looked at how to lower the risk and increase the speed of building while lowering the cost. Sounds like a project management’s dream, right?

The answer was in how they recently built a bunch of server parks.

Building a server park is just like building something out of Lego. The only difference is that you use servers instead of plastic bricks.

If you stack a bunch of servers, you have a rack. Several racks make a row. A bunch of rows makes a room. Multiple rooms rooms make a building.

Need more? Rinse and repeat. A few buildings make a server farm.

In theory, you can repeat this as often as you need. There’s no upper limit to the capacity you can build like this, and the costs only get lower.

This is exactly what they did with the construction of Apple Park…

The building looks like one huge delivery, but underneath, it’s just like a server park. They developed a couple of pods; one for office work, one for teamwork, and one for common areas.

The building itself was then designed to accommodate those pods, repeated over and over again. That’s even how the thing got its circular shape. It was clover leaf initially, but this meant that the corners were too sharp to repeat the pods.

The shape had to be more uniform for the idea to work. And thus, the circle was born.

Now, here’s the thing…

I talk to a lot of project managers. The one thing they all have in common?

They think their project is a special snowflake.

They see ideas like these and come up with dozens of reasons why their project is different. Why this will never work for them.

Now, I’ve joked previously that you can’t iterate a skyscraper in 2-week sprints with user stories like you can with software.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t think more modular.

Modularity is the common denominator in most successful projects I’ve worked on. The more you do something, the more you learn. The more you learn, the faster it goes. Risk goes down. Costs go down.

You get the point, right?

Big goals, small steps. Small experiments at large scale.

Apple used to say “Think Different”. This is a push for the opposite. Less different, more proven ideas, done better and faster.

So next time you’re planning a new project, ask yourself: what’s my Lego brick?

What is the one proven thing you can get really good at, and apply it dozens, hundreds, or thousands of times to create something unique?

If it can be done with a $5B campus, I bet it can be done with your next projects too.

No special snowflakes.

Talk soon,
Jasper

PS: Everything at Apple Park is custom - even the 18-foot-long tables for the social pods. Those tables, all 500(!) of them, were made out of single-piece white oak slabs by a small furniture builder in the Netherlands. One of the hands & brains behind that project? My younger brother.

PPS: this Wired article from 2017 is one of the best stories I’ve read about the building of Apple Park.