Ian Rogers, CEO and founder of construction consultancy Procync, explores the reasons why so many projects go over time, budget, or underdeliver
THERE is a temptation in construction to point at obvious culprits when programmes go wrong such as labour shortages, price spikes, and planning holdups. While those things are real, they tell only part of the story, and they rarely explain why the same faults keep reappearing across projects in Scotland and beyond.
The most persistent cause of delay is a failure of coordination, which shows up as unclear responsibilities, shifting briefs and fractured decision making long before the first pile is driven.
Construction in Scotland matters to the whole economy. It accounts for substantial output and supports local communities. Yet the sector’s performance is uneven and has been struggling with a combination of weaker workloads and long term structural change. Gross Value Added (GVA) in construction was estimated at about £10.8 billion in 2024, representing roughly 7.4% of Scotland’s total economic output, and the sector has experienced average declines in recent years rather than the growth seen elsewhere. Those macro numbers are important because they set the scene, but the practical, day-to-day reality on projects is where the coordination crisis reveals itself.
Universities, hospitals, schools and housing schemes in Scotland involve a wide cast of stakeholders including public funders, local authorities, client teams, end users and a supply chain that is often fragmented. When these groups fail to align on purpose, scope, and risk, the consequences are both immediate and visible.
Housing starts and completions have fallen in recent quarters across the UK, and Scotland has not been immune. The Financial Times reports that there has been a notable drop in sectors such as private rented housing, where new build rental construction fell by around 26% year on year. That level of retreat has direct implications for pipeline certainty and supply chain planning. One common pattern is projects are rushed into procurement with the brief still evolving. There is often commercial or political pressure to demonstrate progress, but that front-end haste routinely stores up problems for delivery.
When the brief is incomplete or contested, key decisions get deferred, contractors bid against one another on different assumptions, and once contracts are awarded, the ability to change direction without hefty cost and time penalties is severely limited. Research across construction suggests that a large share of delay and cost overrun is rooted in execution and administrative issues rather than in pure technical failure, which supports the view that better coordination and clearer governance at the start would reduce pain later.
Scottish projects often have additional layers of complexity. Many public and institutional schemes must satisfy multiple approval gateways, funding timetables and community expectations. When international partners or specialist consultants are involved, the number of decision points multiplies. These aren’t all construction problems at their core, but a project management problem in the margins, where nobody had been given clear authority to resolve competing priorities, and the project lost momentum while those priorities were debated.
A second driver of delay is risk transfer done without realism. Developers, clients and funders often attempt to push risk down the supply chain through rigid contract forms in the hope of protecting themselves. Contractors who cannot price or manage latent uncertainties will either inflate their bids with contingency or accept narrower margins and then seek variations. That approach creates adversarial behaviour, disputes and stop-start programmes, none of which benefits the public purse or the communities waiting for new facilities. A more constructive approach is to design delivery models that share risk sensibly and reward collaboration. Early contractor involvement, two-stage procurement and frameworks that incentivise performance, rather than punishment, all have a role to play.
Technology often gets presented as a cure and digital tools do offer real benefits when they are embedded properly. Building information modelling, common data environments and live programme dashboards can give teams a single source of truth. However, these tools are only useful when the organisation around them enforces their use, when someone is accountable for the data, and when the insights they produce feed decision making. In many projects, the dashboard exists but the meeting forums and decision authorities do not, which means information arrives too late or is ignored.
So, what practical moves reduce delay? First, treat the front end as the part of the project where time invested returns the greatest value. Feasibility, stakeholder alignment and clear operational requirements must be completed before procurement is launched. Sorting out disagreements early is far cheaper than resolving them on site.
Second, adopt delivery structures that create alignment rather than amplifying adversarial incentives. Early involvement is not about giving contractors control, it is about creating shared responsibility so that design and construction teams can problem solve together.
Third, insist that data tools are paired with governance. If dashboards will matter, then the governance forum must be designed to act on them.
Finally, accept that soft skills are not optional. Strong relationships, clear communication and an ethic of ownership prevent many issues from escalating into programme stopping disputes.
These changes are not revolutionary, but they are cultural and they require leadership. For Scotland, where housing and public investment priorities are rightly high on the political agenda, the ability to deliver on time and to cost will depend on shifting attention from headline outputs to the nuts and bolts of project setup, decision rights and joined up delivery. The alternative is to keep chasing productivity gains on site while the underlying causes of delay remain unaddressed, which will simply mean more public money spent on fixing avoidable failure.
The coordination crisis in construction is quiet, it is persistent and it is fixable, but only if clients, policymakers and the supply chain recognise that the problem starts long before the first brick is laid and solving it requires discipline, shared incentives and a willingness to invest time where it matters most.
