Caption: Executing global projects with the current state-of-the-art:

• Project funds are expended over time following the characteristic S curve shown in green;
• Project planners' ability to influence project outcomes falls rapidly once the project begins as the red curve shows (the inverse of the cost S-curve);
• When outcomes become known, all project funds have already been expended and no influence remains;
• The best planners can hope for is to learn from a given project and to adapt on future projects - and even this is difficult, because project participants scatter at the end of a project, and their learnings get diffused;

Advancing the state-of-art to systematic design of organizations and institutions for global change projects;

• Planners of global projects will learn from "virtual experience" in advance of launching a project, the same way engineers learn about the feasibility of alternative designs, when they are developing products;
• Analysis tools that incorporate validated theory and methods enable systematic project design, by predicting outcomes early in the lifecycle of the project when most funds remain and planners' ability to influence outcomes is still high;
• Simulating multiple alternative configurations for global projects will help planners discover options to pursue risk mitigation strategies (such as conflict resolution,negotiations, institutional design) or to delay or forgo the project until the organization and institutional changes can be affected;

Reference: Predicting and Mitigating Institutional Costs in Global Projects, a Presentation by Raymond Levitt and Ashwin Mahalingam.