Why Construction Projects Fail — Part 2: The Silent Saboteur — Lack of Details
When construction projects fail, we often search for dramatic causes. But there's a quieter, more persistent force that erodes success from within — lack of detail. Explore how missing details in schedule, cost, safety, and quality derail projects.
Cyriac Abraham
Founder & CEO
This is the second article in a three-part series originally published on LinkedIn.
If you missed Part 1, read it here: Why Construction Projects Fail — And What You Can Do About It.
The Silent Saboteur — Lack of Details
When a construction project fails, we often search for dramatic causes: poor leadership, unrealistic goals, inadequate funding, or even corruption.
But there's a quieter, more persistent force that erodes success from within — lack of detail.
They say the devil is in the details — and in construction, lack of essential details often becomes assumptions that go missing when you need them most.
In this article, we'll focus on four of the most critical success factors that can make or break a project:
- Schedule
- Cost
- Safety
- Quality
These are just the beginning. Other vital factors — like environment and stakeholder engagement — will follow in future articles.
Cost: A Disconnect Between Estimate and Reality
Cost control doesn't just fail when a number is wrong — it fails when details are missing, mismatched, or manipulated at every step.
From inaccurate estimates to improper budgeting and weak forecasting, the system starts to break down the moment the data becomes fragmented or vague.
Real Example: I once interviewed for a Project Controls Manager role. The company had just fired the previous PCM after discovering a nearly $30 million variance in the forecasted Estimate at Completion. They offered me the position — but I declined.
Why? Because it likely wasn't one person's mistake. It looked like a systemic failure in how cost was being estimated, tracked, reported, and forecasted.
Too often, estimators, cost controllers, and project managers work in different systems — with no clean handoff. The estimator builds a detailed breakdown in one tool, but the cost controller manages budgets in another. When the mapping between line items gets lost, the comparison becomes meaningless.
Here's what that looks like:
- An estimator submits a cost of $100M (with 5% contingency and 5% profit)
- The client negotiates it down to $90M
- Now, the Cost Engineer is expected to deliver the full scope — with just $81M
- The catch? They're still expected to hit the original contingency and profit
How does that work?
Either the estimate was inflated… Or corners are about to be cut.
Then comes the "magic wand" phase: the cost engineer is forced to spread that $81M into cost buckets that were originally estimated for $90M — with little or no traceability. Project leaders adjust categories based on assumptions or priorities. The opportunity to validate the original estimate — and learn from it — is gone.
Budgeting becomes a bureaucratic layer that hides the truth, rather than revealing it.
And without a coordinated, detailed schedule backing it up, even the best cost plan is just a house of cards.
Schedule: Planning Isn't Enough
Planning and scheduling are often lumped together — but they serve very different purposes.
Planning is like broad-brush painting: high-level, abstract, and optimistic. It offers a vision, maybe even some direction — but not enough to guide daily execution.
Scheduling, by contrast, is precise. It's like setting a doctor's appointment: the patient, room, equipment, and staff all need to be aligned for that time slot to work. Flexibility is factored in — but the expectations are clear.
Unfortunately, most construction schedules don't operate at this level of clarity.
Even with powerful tools like Primavera or Microsoft Project, the fine details — labor, equipment, materials, risks, constraints — are often left vague, assumed, or pushed downstream. Many schedules fail to reflect the true requirements of each activity.
The result? Execution on-site becomes improvisation, not orchestration.
And while today's scheduling software may look sophisticated, it rarely bridges this gap. Most platforms are either cost-focused or time-focused — not both. The rest are a tangle of disconnected systems:
- Payroll
- Safety
- Quality
- Communication
- Timekeeping
In a future article, I'll introduce a new way to schedule — one that's both detailed and dynamic.
Safety: Broad Policies, Narrow Blind Spots
Health and safety are treated with high priority in most organizations — and yet, construction still records over 1,000 fatalities per year in the U.S. alone. Globally, that number may exceed 100,000 — though in many countries, safety incidents go underreported or untracked.
Training programs, toolbox talks, and Job Hazard Analyses (JHAs) are standard for high-risk tasks. But accidents still occur — often in routine or low-risk activities where no one expected danger.
Why? Because most safety systems are built for compliance, not breakthrough performance. They reinforce what's already in place — they don't reimagine how safety is integrated into daily work.
Safety policies are important. But without detail, they remain a layer of paperwork, not a shield.
To truly protect teams, safety must move beyond the binder. It must be:
- Task-specific
- Real-time
- Tied to schedule
- Integrated into the flow of work
- Linked to the people, tools, and equipment involved
Safety shouldn't be something reviewed after the fact — it should be part of how work is planned, resourced, and executed from the start.
Quality: Rework Is Still Too Common
Quality may not grab headlines like safety — but it bleeds profits just the same.
Construction firms lose millions each year to rework: unclear drawings, missing specifications, poor craftsmanship, or the wrong materials delivered to site. And unlike safety incidents, these failures often go unnoticed until it's too late — buried in project margins.
Yes, quality circles and training programs exist. But too often, they're disconnected from the reality of daily site execution.
The problem isn't that people don't care about quality — it's that they aren't empowered with the right systems to achieve it.
What's needed is a shift from inspecting quality after the fact to embedding it into the task itself.
That means:
- Trained resources (Workmen must be trained and equipped — and empowered — to act as the first line of quality control).
- Verified materials and workflows
- Real-time visibility
- Integrated checklists and signoffs
- And yes — detail at the point of action, not just in the QA manual
Quality starts on the jobsite — not in the QC office. It begins with the right information, delivered at the right time, to the people doing the job.
P.S.
If you're wondering whether there's a tool that helps with detailed planning, smarter execution, and real-time visibility — that's what we built ProjectScript for.
It's made for you, by me.
Feel free to message me if you'd like to see how it works.
Did you read my first article in this series? If not, click here to read it.
