Hey, look up! The benefits of satellite technologies to monitor and manage megaprojects

“Over time, over budget, over and over again.” Despite megaprojects are increasingly being chosen and used as a preferred delivery mode for goods and services in a wide range of industries (infrastructures, banking, air and space exploration, urban and rural areas regeneration), performance data shows that we are still far from knowing how to manage and control them properly. Given the long duration and the complexity of these projects, an effective progress monitoring system can ensure a better outcome in terms of meeting schedule, cost, and project quality. However, this is particularly difficult when adopting the progress monitoring techniques traditionally used in project management. The advent of emerging technologies (e.g., data analytics, ML, IoT, satellites) led researchers to develop and experiment with a plethora of techniques to monitor and assess the working progress of megaprojects. Among them, satellites technologies (i.e. Earth Observation) offer novel opportunities to monitor and assess the impacts of a wide range of projects (e.g., infrastructure and environment restoration megaprojects), however they are loosely deployed for industrial applications and studied in literature. The aim of this paper is to investigate what are (i) the emerging technologies that are more suitable to be used to track megaproject progress (ii) the benefits and challenges of adopting satellite technologies compared to traditional ones and (iii) the potential for concrete application of these technologies in megaprojects in progress or to be launched. Our analysis demonstrates that the benefits of adopting satellite technologies to evaluate project progress are relevant; consequently, other studies can be done to evaluate the application of the same technologies for data collection regarding megaprojects impacts and value creation after its completion.