Across construction and property, delays and disputes are so common they’re almost expected as inevitable, as Ian Rogers, founder and CEO of Procync, explains in this timely article.
In the UK, just 8.5% of projects are delivered on budget and on time, according to data by Bent Flyvbjerg in the Iron Hand of Project Management. Globally, research from McKinsey has found that 98% of projects incur cost overruns or delays.
External forces are often blamed. Things such as market volatility, procurement hurdles, and design changes. But beneath these surface issues lies a quieter and more persistent problem: poor coordination. It is the reason so many projects fail to deliver as planned, yet it rarely gets called out directly.
Coordination sounds like a simple task, making sure the right people have the right information at the right time. But in reality, it’s far more complex. Construction involves a vast network of people with shifting roles, varied incentives and often fragmented communication channels. Clarity is assumed, but rarely double-checked, with unspoken expectations causing even more problems.
What you end up with is confusion disguised as progress. Work starts before responsibilities are settled and teams move ahead without understanding how their decisions affect others down the line. Key information is lost between handovers of the various stages, and no one notices until the impact is felt on site and delays are unavoidable.
I’ve worked on major projects where every person involved is technically competent, yet the project still faces issues. This isn’t because of a lack of skill, but because no one has a full view of the whole picture. Coordination is almost always left to chance, or treated as a box-ticking exercise. When cracks appear, people revert to protecting their own scope, and recovery becomes the focus of the job, rather than delivery.
We’ve seen what happens when this goes unchecked. Disputes increase. Productivity drops. Relationships break down. Time and money are wasted solving problems that could have been avoided with early alignment and clear ownership. Even legal issues arise. And when projects do get delivered, their performance is often compromised.
There’s a tendency to treat coordination as a ‘soft’ issue, not a strategic one, but that’s a serious misjudgement. Good coordination enables better decisions, faster responses and more predictable outcomes. It reduces risk across the board, including commercial, operational, the overall reputation of a company and the industry as a whole.
Technology has a role to play, and there are plenty of tools aimed at improving visibility and collaboration. For example, the Internet of Things can be leveraged, using sensors to monitor building performance, with monitoring being even more essential since the passing of the new Building Safety Act, which demands stronger accountability, data transparency, and lifecycle oversight. But these can’t replace human leadership. Projects need individuals who take responsibility for integration, not just managing contracts, but managing relationships, sequencing, and shared understanding.
The best-run projects I’ve seen are those that embed coordination from the very beginning. They invest time up front to clarify roles, challenge assumptions and build trust between teams. They treat communication as an absolute requirement, not a side activity. They recognise that misalignment early on leads to failure later.
In an ideal world, coordination would begin well before the design team is appointed. Project setup would include structured feasibility and viability testing as standard practice, not afterthoughts. The early stages would involve clearly defined phases, with time and space to interrogate needs, risks and responsibilities before the first drawing is produced. Room data sheets, operational requirements and user needs would shape the design brief from the outset, not be reverse-engineered later. The technology to support this already exists from digital twins to integrated planning tools but many in the industry remain wary. Years of delivery issues and strained relationships have created a culture of caution. Until that changes, we’ll keep failing to use the tools at our disposal to their full potential.
This won’t slow the process down in the long run. It’s all about setting things up properly so they don’t collapse under pressure. A detailed process at the start of a project to get everyone aligned can prevent weeks of wasted time months down the line. Yet too often, we rush in and hope the rest will follow.
Construction doesn’t have to be this chaotic. But we need to change how we think about coordination. It is not admin or overhead. It is the thread that holds delivery together. Until we treat it with the importance it deserves, the industry will keep repeating the same costly mistakes.
