Managing Construction Delay Is a Team Sport
By Michael Pink, Founder and CEO of SmartPM
Delay is a taboo word in construction. I know this because I have studied construction delay for my entire twenty-five-year career. Ask a room of leaders whether the industry has a delay problem and they agree without hesitation. Ask whether their own projects are delayed, and the answer flips. Their projects, they tell me, are the exception. I have heard it from hundreds of them, and it puzzled me, because McKinsey found that seventy-seven percent of the world’s largest projects finish at least forty percent behind schedule. So I dug deeper. Delay, I came to see, is a communication failure as much as a scheduling one, and managing it well is a team sport.
What I found was a problem of definition. I was asking whether a project would finish later than its contractual end date, while the people answering were hearing something narrower, whether they had been forced to request an extension of time or pay the owner liquidated damages. Those are not the same question, and the difference matters, because the first one is where the money starts to move.
What construction delay costs contractors and owners
As I look at it, delay means a finish later than the contractual completion date. The cost falls on two parties. Contractors carry extended general conditions, the price of keeping crews and equipment on site longer. Owners lose revenue and pay to carry an asset that is not yet earning. Construction runs on competitive bids, so duration drives price, and in my experience a GC’s fee runs around ten percent of a project, the thin band where profit lives. Getting the duration right is how GCs win work and protect their margins.
Why construction delay is a communication problem
The pressure to hit the completion date plays out in a familiar arc. A project gets going and everything looks fine. Early on, the structure slips, yet strangely, the end date holds. It repeats through the MEP trades, and still the end date holds. Owners start asking questions and get waved off. Then, six months out with half the drywall up, the idea that the job will finish on time becomes impossible to defend, and they demand to know how. The next update arrives with extensions of time, time-impact analyses, change orders, and RFIs baked in, all of it explaining why the project is late and why none of it is the contractor’s fault.
The arc has two roots, overconfidence by the site team in making changes to overcome delay/disruption and a lack of visibility for the people who make the decisions while this is going on. After so many years studying it, I am convinced it is not bad ethics or manipulation. It is closer to a phenomenon, where contractors act with good intentions and loose standards. The people who hold the client relationship and the authority to fix problems sit too far from the work to see what is really happening, while the crews who watch it take shape are too close to read what the accumulating issues will do to the schedule or the budget as they consistently sweep them under the rug. In between, the person responsible for the time and the budget is carried along by the same optimism, reluctant to force a hard conversation about what is slipping and who owns it.
Time and again I was brought in after a project had run long, to read the data and explain what had gone wrong. The team across the table had sat in the meetings and lived the project, yet their account of why the project slipped and what the schedule recorded were two different stories, and the difference came down to communication rather than analysis. Even the largest, best-funded jobs run long for the same reason. The same McKinsey data above showed ninety-eight percent ran more than thirty percent over budget, and when the causes were grouped, inadequate communication ranked near the top, with the parties on a job each working from a different version of where the project stood.
Part of the reason is the raw material. A construction schedule is a contractual deliverable, and even on a small or mid-sized commercial job can carry thousands of activities, which makes the file itself close to unreadable for the superintendent who only needs to know what the crews build next. At the same time, the same activities have to be read as a whole to judge performance and gauge risk of finishing late or over budget. Someone has to boil it all down into terms each level can read and act on, and most teams stop short, so the information sits in a system the field and the office can both open while few can turn it into a decision.
Turning the schedule into a tool the whole team uses
The reflexive answer is to hand the PM or scheduler a sharper tool and shave time off the analysis, which leaves the real barrier untouched, since the finding still has to travel to the people who can respond. Played as a team sport, the same schedule has to reach an executive weighing dollars and risk, a project manager deciding how to run the job, and a superintendent who needs to know what the crews start in the morning, and the raw file serves all three poorly. Hand the data to one group and withhold it from the rest, and you have moved the bottleneck to a new desk rather than removing it. Once the readings line up, the finger pointing that follows a slip gives way to a working conversation about recovery.
A slip can hide for a long time before it ever touches the end date. When Construction Dive analyzed roughly 321,000 scheduled construction tasks, the largest single source of delay was crews waiting on another trade, a coordination breakdown that eats a schedule’s float long before the finish date moves. By the time the date finally jumps, the cheapest fixes are gone and the job is on its way to an argument over who pays.
Delay is rarely one person’s fault, and it is not cured by one alone. Projects finish on time when the people from the trailer to the boardroom see where the schedule is exposed and work the problem together, turning it back into a tool the whole team uses instead of a document one group keeps current.
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