What are the root causes of project failure? One project planning expert thinks he knows.

“I don’t have every answer to why the construction industry is struggling in some ways and succeeding in others but I think I have a pretty good handle on the root causes of success or failure that we can reduce or amplify.”

That’s according to Mark Chapman, who has worked for a range of difference civil engineering contractors including Balfour Beatty, Birse Civils, and CIMIC Group across four separate continents over nearly 30 years, before becoming head of innovation at specialist construction software firm Elecosoft last year.

Chapman was an early adopter of building information management (BIM) and first experimented with 4D BIM (the process of combining 3D models with time- and schedule-related information) in 2009 during some downtime between tenders.

Using construction management software Synchro and drawing his own 3D models in SketchUp, he started to take a basic approach to visualising construction sequences. It soon came in handy. “The next tender I did was so complex it was hard to get your head around it. It was strengthening and renovating a quayside in north east England to be able to put wind farms into the North Sea. But I had just found out about 4D BIM so I thought ‘let’s see what I can do’. And before you knew it, we had tender presentations showing this thing in 4D and how we were going to deliver it,” says Chapman.

Later in his career while working in Australia, his reputation for “seeing things a little differently” ended up in him being appointed as the head of planning for the CIMIC Group. “I started working in a new company that was formed called EIC Activities. That was where the group threw all of their subject matter experts together in the hope that they would collaborate and start to deliver innovative ways of working and best practice. We would quite often get thrown into quite large projects where let’s say things could have been going better,” he explains.

The team touched 80-90 projects and tenders a year across the whole of the Asia-Pacific region.

“It gave me and my team a fairly unique perspective over four to five years to see up close and personal the root causes of failure and success and how common they were across projects. It wasn’t just one company – it was a group of companies across a diverse geography,” he adds.

Root causes

So what were the most common root causes of problems or success on projects?

“One thing we saw was really consistent. It’s going to sound obvious, but planning a project reliably is a thing that is easy to do badly but hard to do well,” says Chapman.

“You will see A-teams within construction companies that can smash this out of the park all day, every day. But unfortunately, our industry is not full of A-teams. Instead, it is full of people who have never worked together and never touched a project like that before. They might not have the planning skills.

“You might start off with a client that has an unrealistic expectation that something is going to be delivered in 12 months. You, as a contractor, may be given four or five weeks to work out whether 12 months is possible. And because of the competitive world we live in, more often than not contractors will try to fit into that 12 months whether it is possible or not. Then it won’t be very long before you realise it is 18 months or two years.”

“There are many reasons why it is not easy to do – it is not just capability, it is the contractual world we live in, it is skills, it is information problems. But it all comes back to failure to plan.”

‘Active 4D’

In his role at CIMIC Group, Chapman and his colleagues tried to work out how to stop project overruns happening in the first place. “We tried things like improving training, process, governance. We had some success but then we started to realise that changing people, process and training only got you so far,” he says.

“Construction projects are incredibly complex things now. Some of them are really big – the biggest one I dealt with was A$4.5 billion. There’s no way one person can keep all of that in their head. It is a complex, moving thing that changes over time. Technology really started to fall into place for us in terms of managing that complexity. But we understood that we couldn’t just wrap technology around a broken process.”

As a result, Chapman and his colleagues started to pioneer innovative ways of working. One of those approaches, developed in partnership with Elecosoft, is called ‘Active 4D’, a term that Elecosoft has since trademarked.

The standard approach to 4D involves basing 3D models on 2D Gantt chart-style formats that integrate projects schedules into the 3D models to allow construction teams to view the project in 4D.

But Chapman warns, “This still relies on a heavily manual and chaotic process. There’s a lot of data input, conversations, emails, drawings, and then you are putting the technology on top of it.

Mark Chapman

“You end up spending about 70-75% of your time planning the project in a Gantt chart format and then if you are lucky you might have 20% where you can see it in 4D. That doesn’t give you long to optimize what you are going to build. Before you know it, you are submitting your tender and you are held to that duration and sequence.”

By contrast, Active 4D turns the process on its head, according to Chapman. It involves using the 3D model throughout the planning process. “We start with the model. You see the geometry but what you can’t see is the metadata behind it. And the metadata is very well structured. What you are able to do with the automation that we’ve built into PowerProject is to suck that metadata in and put it onto the activities you have created and have them related to 3D objects in seconds.”

The upshot, according to Chapman, is that construction teams then have far more time to examine the project in 4D and have conversations about the best way to deliver and optimise it without waiting until the end of the data entry process.

“As a contractor, I need to figure out how I am going to deliver this complex thing – I don’t know yet but I am going to figure it out. The planning process is a tool for figuring it out. But if you have spent most of that time entering and collating data in a not-very-visual way, then it’s really hard from my experience,” he explains.

‘Clients should let contractors innovate’

One area that Chapman would like to see change is clients and government organisations specifying how projects should be planned, whether it is the tool or the process that construction teams have to use.

“The specification of the process gets propagated contract after contract. It becomes fixed in stone that this is how you have to do it. But what it actually means is that you are preventing contractors from innovating,” he asserts.

“It’s quite common, over the last 30 years, for the tool and the process to be specified. But we haven’t improved our reliability or productivity in this industry over that time. So I can tell you that that’s not the solution.”

And he uses the analogy of construction a swimming pool in your back garden. “Rather than telling the contractor that they must use a shovel, let them use the excavator they want to use. It’s a far better tool or process for delivering the pool that you want,” he says.