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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1006 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for May 27, 2026

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Major Building projects are often structured under a EPCM (Engineering, Procurement, Construction and Management) model, and sometimes even in a PPP (Public-Private Partnership) arrangement.

This means you can have multiple organisations quickly spinning up a Joint Venture or other structure to deliver the entire project. This might consist of a public procurement organisation, along with a building consortium, an architectural company and an engineering company. In this case you would consider the public organisation to be the end client, but even they may be overseen by independent regulators for certain sectors (eg aviation or rail). Also the engineering or architectural company might subcontract out certain specialist disciplines (acoustic engineering, or landscape design) to other companies. So in some cases you can go: Independent regulator > Public Procurement organisation > Building conglomerate > Architectural Co > Engineering Co > Subcontracted Engineering Co. Due to contractual and other reasons (including individuals with controlling traits), every organization between you and the regulator may want you to line communicate through them rather than directly with any organisation above them. Also within any of these organisations as discussed there could be their own line chain of communication.

Now in practice you can normally talk directly to individuals across the project as long as you cc in relevant stakeholders, but sometimes, particularly when contracts and specifications are involved, things can be bogged down as every person in the chain wishes to review (and sometimes censor or otherwise modify) information provided by those below them.

Also, with mega projects there can be a ridiculous number of stakeholders that might presume you are available for the duration of a project that runs for 5+ years and attempt to contact you directly. This can be why some people refuse to put their mobile phone numbers in their email/Aconex signatures.

Now most of the time things don't go badly, but it has been known for people senior in the hierarchy to have a bad day due to things entirely outside of the control of people lower in the hierarchy and disproportionately escalate issues because they don't understand the systemic reasons for the issue existing in the first place. For a person at the bottom of the hierarchy, this can be very very stressful in some circumstances. Like if the Executive Project Manager Builder screams at an engineer that they are in breach of contract because the engineer didn't immediately provide a deliverable because the architectural firm above them hadn't actually authorised them to do the work, because Janice from Finance had gone on maternity leave.

There is so much more that could be written about this, but just understand that consulting runs into miscommunication issues all of the time, due to factors that are often outside of your control, even if you are pro-active with your communication.

Thanks. Ever think about if there's a better way? The natural impulse is to put everything under one roof but it seems there's too much here.

The Joint Ventures are meant to be putting things under the one roof (and they will literally do so sometimes with a shared Project Office). This is mainly cosmetic though as every individual organisation within the JV will consistently act in their own interest. Its common to see people from one part of the JV send through a deliverable that is meant to go to the end client that says 'no we aren't providing this thing that was clearly in the Master Specification because its outside of our scope' until they get their skull bashed in have things explained by a project manager somewhere in the chain that they need to present their deliverable as if they representing the JV.

The short version is that better reporting structures and hierarchies could be made, but there are incentives against it. Having experience in major bids, there is massive pressure to quickly spin up a Joint Venture and divide the scope of work as soon as a tender is awarded so as best to meet delivery deadlines. This can cause massive confusion in communications at the start of a project as 'who is doing what' and 'what needs doing' is often unclear. Unclear communication channels and reporting hierarchies can persist long into the project, not helped by sub-organisations joining and leaving the project as their scopes are started and completed.

Also the usual financial and contractual incentives can create delay in communication and delivery. For instance, there is an incentive to be competitive on your company's individual bid for a scope of work. This might mean that you don't have much 'fat' in the fee, so to reduce costs you will limit the time you spend on the project (and will be responsible for to your internal line management). You will also not commence work on any part of a scope until a contract has been agreed. Even though the broader project itself may have hard deadlines coming up and a part of the scope has been overlooked and a variation needs to be negotiated and builders are notoriously tight fisted and wish to waste time arguing with architects, engineers and consultants that something is within their prior scope even though it isn't.

There isn't really a way around these issues. It can be common for some correspondence or deliverable transmittals to have over 100 recipients, leading to inbox hell which is its own problem as things get lost in the noise. It was also common to have to remind senior stakeholders that I had already responded or completed a task and here are the attached meeting minutes for the meetings which they chaired six months ago and three months ago where I discussed and resolved the issue at length after being accused of indolence.

tldr; Haven't really found a better way to deal with this except perhaps to push for a single point of contact for communication, but that just plain doesn't work on larger projects.

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