In the first article of a new series on construction project management, Andy Pritchard MCIOB looks at how to recover a failing job. He sets out the four key moves to make in the order they need to happen
Projects do not fail all at once. They drift.
A week here. A revised sequence there. A partner who promises to catch up and never quite does. By the time the critical path shows it, intervention is no longer cheap.
You can hear a job slip before any dashboard shows it. The programme stops being mentioned. Dates get defended instead of discussed. Progress gets claimed instead of measured. Those are culture events, and they are the job asking for help.
Construction Management reported in April on a GIRI and CITB programme across 25 projects worth £942.5m, where participants estimated £92.6m of error was avoided, £71.2m of it by eliminating inadequate planning, the biggest cause of error by value.
How a late job usually gets handled
The instinct is more reports and more pressure. Move a senior project manager across, send in the commercial director, ask for a recovery programme by Friday. It feels like action.
Three things then go wrong.
Pressure arrives before honesty. Pressure on a programme nobody believes teaches a site to hide bad news, and hidden bad news is how a slip becomes a crisis.
The recovery programme gets written in an office. It lands on the people who have to build it, who were never asked.
The job switches from building to evidencing. Every hour building the argument is an hour not spent finishing the building. King’s College London and the Adjudication Society recorded 2,264 adjudication referrals in the year to April 2024, the highest since statutory adjudication began in 1998, with inadequate contract administration the leading cause.
Four moves, in order
1. Measure the truth. Honest measurement comes first, because you cannot accelerate a fiction. Get a real baseline inside the first week: programme, commercial and team, but also design, procurement and manufacture of the critical elements, which is usually where a late job is lost. If your first recovery meeting produces a position that flatters somebody, you have a negotiation rather than a baseline.
2. Rebuild it with the people who build it. A recovery programme imposed on the supply chain is fiction with a deadline. Before you ask for commitment, pay what is due and settle the accounts. A partner who is square with you helps rebuild the sequence. One who is owed money turns up to protect a position. Then get the trades round the table, giving each the critical path around their scope. The plan comes true only if the people doing the work made the promises.
3. Resequence for efficiency, not for the record. Keep contemporaneous records to the standard in the SCL Delay and Disruption Protocol, but as a by-product of running the job well. And resequence with your CDM 2015 principal contractor duties in front of you. More trades in less space is the classic recovery decision, and the construction phase plan has to follow. A programme you cannot build safely is not a recovery.
4. Lead the team that is behind. Morale, honesty with the customer, and the behaviours that get partners to lean in rather than lawyer up. Nobody rebuilds a sequence honestly in a room where the last person to bring bad news got taken apart. I have taken struggling jobs off site for a day to rebuild the team. It looks like the last thing you can afford when you are eight weeks down, and it is usually what makes the new plan stick. A motivated team matters as much as the plan.
Then go round again. Recovery is rarely a single pass.
It can be done. An £11m school project I joined eight weeks into delay, seven months from handover, finished on the contractual date. A £12m school where resized frame panels quadrupled hook time and cost ten weeks, recovered to two days by resequencing. Both were rebuilt with the people doing the work.
What to do next, whichever seat you are in
If you run the job. Take the next four weeks of your programme and mark every activity finished, started or not started, by walking it. Then do the same for design, procurement and manufacture, because a package nobody ordered never shows up on a site walk. The gap between that and your last update is your real position.
If you commission the job. Ask who was in the room when the recovery plan was built. If it does not include the people doing the work, you have been handed a date, not a plan. Then measure your own side: how long every approval, information request and change decision has sat with you. Take it in before asking for theirs, and say whether you are funding acceleration or granting time. Opening a battle with a team already behind costs you the delivery you are trying to protect.
If you advise on the job. Interrogate the logic, not the dates: where the float went, whether the resource behind each line exists, and what the plan assumes about information nobody has issued. On NEC, ask for the early warning register, which clause 15 makes a duty on both parties. On JCT, ask for the delay notices. An empty file on a visibly slipping job is not a clean project. It is a quiet one.
The discipline sits in the CIOB’s own Guide to Good Practice in the Management of Time in Major Projects, which treats the programme as a model to manage, not a baseline to defend.
What it needs beyond that is a job where problems get shared quickly and openly, and where the senior team, the customer, the contractor and the supply chain all answer the same way: how can we help?
Andy Pritchard MCIOB is a business improvement consultant, Construction Manager of the Year Gold Medal winner and author of Going for Gold: Constructing Project Managers.
