92% of the world's megaprojects overrun either budget or schedule. Often both. That is not a guess, it is the conclusion from Oxford professor Bent Flyvbjerg, who has analysed more than 16,000 large projects across industries and continents.
His prescription is simple to state and hard to follow: think slow, act fast.
Take the time you need to understand what you are walking into. Map the risks, think the scenarios through and create clarity about interfaces before the first machine rolls onto the site. After that you can act quickly, because the foundation is in place.
It sounds obvious. Yet we see the opposite again and again in Danish construction.
There is a widespread urge to get the shovel in the ground as fast as possible. It feels productive. But as Flyvbjerg points out, it is precisely in the planning phase that the seed of the problems, or of the success, is sown.
When a large construction project meets an existing operation, a complex urban space or a listed building, hundreds of interfaces appear. Access, delivery flow, traffic management, temporary installations, safety zones. Each of them is a potential conflict that costs time and money if it is only discovered along the way.
This is where a thorough preliminary analysis makes the difference. Not as another layer of consultancy, but as the foundation the rest of the project is built on.
A preliminary analysis of the construction site is about creating a visual and operational basis for decisions. That means 2D and 3D models, phase visualisations and logistics programmes that make complex scenarios understandable for everyone involved, all the way from the client and the board to consultants, authorities and contractors.
The purpose is to make the consequences of different choices visible before those choices are made. What happens to the traffic when the eastern access road closes? How does the position of the site accommodation affect the delivery flow? Can operations continue while the shell is going up?
Those are exactly the questions we at SiteHub believe should be answered in the planning phase. The more unknowns you remove early, the faster and cheaper the construction becomes.
One of the most common misunderstandings is that thorough planning delays the project. Flyvbjerg’s research shows the opposite: it is the time spent on site that is the real risk factor. The longer a project drags on, the more exposed it is to the unforeseen.
Or as he puts it: it is not size that kills projects, it is time.
A preliminary analysis that takes a few weeks can save months on site. It gives clear recommendations to clients, consultants and contractors and creates a shared basis of knowledge that every party can work from.
On the projects where the construction site, with its operations, logistics and other running costs, is thought in from the start, the costs typically land at 4–6% of the construction cost. On projects where the planning of the construction site has been inadequate, the figure often ends at 15–20%. The difference is significant, and it is created in the planning phase.
Morten Abildgaard, CCO of SiteHub
We at SiteHub believe Danish construction needs to take the planning phase far more seriously. Particularly on complex projects, where the number of moving parts and interfaces is enormous and has to coexist for years. That takes a change of culture, where the client takes on more responsibility early in the process, and where the right skills are brought in before the tender is written.
It is not a question of slowing down. It is a question of investing time in the right place, so the rest of the project can run faster, cheaper and with fewer surprises.
Think slow, act fast.
