Construction’s Biggest Cause of Delay Is the One Thing Nobody Teaches

Ask construction people what causes delay, and they tell you the same thing they have told every survey for the last decade. Not the weather. Not money. Not a difficult client. The plan.

In a 2022 industry survey, 31 percent named poor original planning and unrealistic scheduling as the number one reason projects run late. It was the top answer in 2016 too. Nothing had moved.

This is not just what people feel. It is what the data finds when someone actually measures it. In a programme reported this year, the Get It Right Initiative and CITB worked across 25 live UK projects worth nearly a billion pounds and tracked where avoidable error came from. Inadequate planning was, in their words, by far the biggest cause. It accounted for roughly 71 of the 93 million pounds of error they managed to head off. Three quarters of the waste, traced back to the plan.

So here is a fair question. If planning is the number one thing that goes wrong, the training market must be full of courses that teach a project manager how to plan a job that actually finishes on time.

I have spent the last few weeks reading that market, the way a delivery person reads it rather than a course brochure. It is not full of those courses. It has barely got any.

We Have Known This for Thirty Years

None of this is a new discovery. In 1994, Sir Michael Latham called the industry adversarial, fragmented and incapable of delivering for its customers, and set a target of cutting costs by 30 percent. In 1998, Sir John Egan told construction to do it entirely differently, and set targets for cutting time, cost and defects year on year.

Ten years after his own report, Egan was asked how the industry had done. His answer: about four out of ten. In 2009 Andrew Wolstenholme reviewed progress again and put it more bluntly still. We could have had a revolution, he said, and what we achieved was a bit of improvement.

Read that honestly and something uncomfortable falls out of it. The diagnosis has been right for thirty years. The reports were not wrong. The knowledge of what good looks like has existed the entire time. We have written the same prescription over and over, and the patient has not taken the medicine. That is not an information problem. You cannot fix it with another framework, another report, or another dashboard, because we have never been short of any of those. We have been short of people who can take what we already know and make it happen on a live job. And that is a question of how we train them.

What We Actually Train Project Managers To Do

There is no shortage of project management training in this country. There are professional qualifications, chartered routes, master’s degrees, executive programmes, software courses and contract schools. A contractor that wants to develop its project managers has plenty to spend a budget on. The trouble is what almost all of it teaches.

Start with the qualification most project managers hold. The APM’s flagship is a fine grounding in the language of the discipline. But look at how it is assessed. Its own syllabus states that the exam will not require any calculations to be performed. Candidates are asked to describe, explain and outline. It tests whether you can talk fluently about governance, life cycles and leadership theory. It does not, and is not trying to, test whether you can sequence a real job and drive it to a finish. PRINCE2 sits alongside it, a genuinely useful method, but a deliberately generic one, the same seven processes whether you are building a hospital or launching software.

The chartered routes through the RICS and my own institution, the CIOB, are more construction-grounded and I value mine, but they assess competence through written submissions, case studies and an interview. They confirm that you know the profession. They do not put you in front of a live programme and a room full of trades and watch what you do. The university master’s degrees are, by their own module descriptions, about management principles and theory, taught through lectures and group work. Rigorous, valuable, and academic by design.

Climb higher and you reach the executive tier, Oxford, Cranfield, the Major Projects Association, the work of Bent Flyvbjerg on why big programmes overrun. Some of the best thinking anywhere on project failure lives here. But it operates at the altitude of strategy and national portfolios. It is a long way from a building manager trying to get the groundworks closed out before the frame arrives. At the other end sit the technical schools, training people in Asta or Primavera, the planning software roughly nine in ten major contractors run on. They teach the tool, not the thinking. And the commercial and claims providers, tellingly, teach planning as a defensive art, building the record for the dispute everyone assumes is coming.

Line it all up and the pattern is hard to miss. We have built an entire profession that rewards people for being able to describe a project, assessed by exam, essay and interview, and almost none of it asks them to prove they can finish one.

Where That Argument is Too Easy

I want to be fair to the thing I am criticising, because the honest version of this argument is stronger than the lazy one.

There is a discipline that teaches collaborative, on-site delivery planning properly. It is lean construction, and the Last Planner System built by Glenn Ballard and Greg Howell. It teaches trades to agree the sequence between them and plan the work in short, reliable cycles. It is genuinely the craft I am talking about. The problem is not that it does not exist, it is that UK adoption is thin and patchy, and the most common reason firms give for not using it is a lack of training and know-how. The cure exists and most of the industry has never been taught to take it.

Apprenticeships are the other honest exception. The site management and project management standards are built around learning the job by doing it, with the qualification layered on top. That model is exactly right. It is also the model the rest of the profession has quietly drifted away from.

And the fairest point of all. The APM and PRINCE2 were never designed to teach site craft. They are generic frameworks, on purpose, and that is a reasonable division of labour. The certificate was always meant to sit on top of experience, not replace it.

Which is the real problem, and it is sharper than blaming any one course. We have started to mistake the certificate for the craft. We promote the person with the qualification and assume the delivery ability comes attached. It does not. A certificate is a photograph of knowledge. The craft is the thing moving in the room, and we stopped teaching it on purpose somewhere along the way.

The Craft That Lives in People’s Heads

Bent Flyvbjerg, who has studied more failed projects than almost anyone alive, keeps returning to an old idea. The master builder. The person whose judgement was earned through long experience, who had built enough to know in their bones what would work. He calls it practical wisdom, and his point is that it cannot be downloaded. It is built, slowly, by doing the work.

I know that kind of knowledge exists because I have spent twenty two years building it. Fifteen years on sites, twenty three projects from five to forty million pounds, then running the planning function for an entire interiors business. At one point I wrote the planning strategy for that business myself, a version for NEC and a version for JCT, and then trained the whole delivery community in it, around a hundred and fifty project managers and senior building managers. Not one page of what I taught them came off a shelf. There was no shelf. The thing that actually wins on site had never been turned into a syllabus anyone could take.

That is the real gap. The knowledge that finishes jobs early is not missing from this industry. It is sitting in the heads of a few thousand experienced people, and it walks out of the door every Friday in the minds of those about to retire. We pass it on by accident, if at all, to whoever happens to be standing next to the right person at the right time. For something this expensive to get wrong, that is a remarkable way to run a profession.

Why This is a Business Problem, Not a Box-Ticking One

If you run a contracting business, this is not an HR detail. It is sitting in your numbers. The average margin across the Top 100 contractors was 2.4 percent last year. Forty three of them made less than 2 percent and sixteen lost money. Against that, the Get It Right Initiative estimates avoidable error costs the industry up to a quarter of project value, and we already know the single biggest slice of that error is the plan.

It shows up again when projects turn nasty. The most recent King’s College London study with the Adjudication Society found the two leading causes of construction disputes were inadequate contract administration, named by half of respondents, and a plain lack of competence among the people involved, named by 42 percent. Extension of time remains the single most common thing we fight about. These are not bad-luck problems. They are capability problems wearing a legal costume.

Then look inside your own business at the gap between your best project manager and your average one. It is rarely a gap in qualifications. They often hold the same certificates. The difference is the craft, the instinct for sequence, buffer, buy-in and recovery that the best ones built over years and the rest were simply never taught. Right now there is almost nowhere to send the rest to learn it. So the gap stays exactly where it is, and you pay for it on every job.

What Comes Next

There is a hopeful thing buried under all of this. A craft that can be described can be taught. The only reason it has not been is that the people who can do it have been too busy doing it to write it down, and most of the people writing the courses have never stood in a site cabin at half past seven explaining a programme change to a fed up groundworker.

I have spent the last twenty years building both halves on purpose, the operator who can also describe the method. Over the next couple of weeks I am going to show you what that craft actually looks like in practice, starting with the difference between planning to protect yourself and planning to finish, the discipline that decides whether a job ends early or ends in a dispute. And then I am going to show you something I have built to teach it.

If any of this resonates, I run a free workshop for contractors and tier two businesses who suspect the gap between their best teams and the rest is costing them more than they realise. No pitch, no slide deck. We look honestly at how your business plans and delivers, and where the same mistakes keep repeating. You can book directly at constructing-culture.co.uk.

We have spent thirty years writing the diagnosis. It might be time we taught the cure.