When capital projects are conceived, budgets for various costs of the project are developed and then refined over the life of the project.  For a new facility one of those costs is “Site Acquisition”.

It’s fairly common for a community to offer “free land or work” in some form to entice a desirable business to locate there.  Who doesn’t want something for free? Especially if you have budget responsibility for the project.

Sometimes these are good sites and worth consideration. But sometimes, they aren’t.

Several years ago, a site was selected by a future Client mainly because it was “free” and in a desirable location. The Client felt good about the decision because the budget for site acquisition was about $1 million.

Then came the bad news – because of soils issues, the costs of site grading and development would be more than $3 million over their budget.  And extended their schedule by 2 months.  Not exactly “free land” anymore.

Reasonable due diligence and an understanding of the results would have identified the problem and without doubt the Client would have made a different decision. They got excited about the prospect of savings $1 million early in the process and failed to count the total cost of the “free land.” It was a hard earned lesson we’re sure they never repeated.

A while back we called on a prospective client. As the meeting broke up we had the chance to talk with the client’s project manager.  Wanting to tailor our proposal to his preferences, we asked what type of Project Delivery Method he preferred. He deflected and asked what we suggested.

Since it was a process expansion project we suggested EPC. He replied “I tried that once. It didn’t work out.” We poked and prodded trying to find out why, but made no progress.

Ok, what about CM at Risk? “I tried that too. It didn’t work out either”.

Straight CM? “Did that once too. It didn’t work out”.

Design-Bid-Build? “No, tried that too and it was the worst job ever.”

There was obviously a problem here and it wasn’t which type of project delivery method to use.

More important than the delivery method are the capabilities of the people assigned to your project.  Any delivery method is only as good as the people executing it.  That includes the Client’s.

The best project delivery method? Depends.  Get some good advice from a good firm to find out which is right for your project (and why).  And pay attention to the qualifications of the people involved – we think they are more important than the delivery method.