Kirk Kendall | The Hidden Cost of Poor Planning in Large-Scale Construction

Kirk Kendall

A project that's over budget by 20% and behind schedule by six months looks like a project management failure. But when you really examine what went wrong, you usually find that the failure happened much earlier. It wasn't in the managing of the project. It was in the planning of it.

Kirk Kendall has worked on enough large-scale industrial programs to recognize the pattern. The projects that blow up share a common origin story. Someone, somewhere, made a decision with incomplete information. Or worse—with information that wasn't assembled into a coherent picture until it was too late to change course.

The costs of that show up in ways that traditional project accounting often misses.

Start with the obvious: schedule delays add overhead. When a team that should wrap in eighteen months stays on site for twenty-four, you're carrying equipment costs, security, site management, and utilities. That's tangible and it shows up in reports. But it's often not the biggest cost.

The harder costs to track are the ones hidden in change orders. Poor planning creates ambiguity. Ambiguity creates disputes about what was actually supposed to happen. Those disputes turn into change orders. One contractor claims the design didn't account for site conditions they flagged early. Another says the schedule doesn't match the delivery timing they need. Suddenly you're in contract renegotiations. Lawyers get involved. Progress slows.

On one project Kirk worked on—a major industrial expansion—the initial plan underestimated the complexity of integrating new equipment with existing infrastructure. It was a design issue that should have been caught in planning. Instead, it was discovered during construction. The fix was straightforward in theory: redesign the interface, adjust the schedule. In practice, it meant weeks of engineering rework, coordination with multiple suppliers, and a change order that ran into seven figures.

But there's another cost that's even harder to measure: lost productivity.

When a project isn't planned thoroughly, crews are constantly working in incomplete information. They're waiting for clarifications. They're stopping work because the next phase isn't ready. They're installing something, then uninstalling it because the design changed. Efficiency collapses. A crew that could normally complete a task in five days now needs seven. Not because they're slower—because the work environment is chaotic.

That might not sound like much on a single task. Multiply it across hundreds of tasks over a two-year project and it's significant.

Then there's the human cost. Crews and site leadership work harder under poor planning. They're problem-solving constantly, often solving the same problems repeatedly because the root cause wasn't addressed. Morale drops. Quality of work becomes inconsistent. And often, experienced people leave the project. Superintendents who could manage complexity get frustrated with chaos and move to better-run projects. That means the team gets weaker exactly when they need to be strongest.

Kirk has seen contract performance suffer for this reason. A subcontractor starts engaged and professional. But if they spend months trying to coordinate with a poorly planned team, unable to do their work efficiently, they stop caring about quality and start counting days until they're done. That's not necessarily their failure. It's a symptom of a project that isn't structured for success.

There's also the opportunity cost that rarely gets calculated. When project leadership is consumed with firefighting—solving problems that poor planning created—they can't do the strategic work that would make the project better. They can't optimize; they're just managing daily crises. They can't mentor junior staff; they're too busy. They can't anticipate future issues; they're responding to present ones.

On military operations, Kirk learned that the difference between a well-run operation and a chaotic one often came down to something simple: had someone actually thought through the entire sequence? Had they asked what would break, when it would break, and what they'd do about it? Or had they just hoped it would work and adjusted as problems arose?

The same principle applies to construction. Hope is not a strategy. When a team sits down and actually plans a project—not just creates a schedule, but genuinely thinks through how work will flow, what could go wrong, and how to structure things to be resilient—the quality of execution is measurably different.

Poor planning creates an expensive mess. You don't see all the costs in one place. You see them scattered across change orders, schedule overruns, rework, remediation, overtime, and lost productivity. You see them in experienced people leaving the industry because projects are chaos. You see them in quality issues that show up months after construction completes.

The prevention is actually cheaper than the cure. Better planning takes time and discipline. It requires experienced people to sit down and think carefully, not just react. But the cost of that planning—the hours, the travel, the meetings—is almost always a fraction of what you'll spend fixing problems that poor planning created.

This is why the best project managers spend so much time on something that doesn't directly build anything: planning. They understand that their real job is removing the conditions that create expensive failure.