01 ACROSS ORGANISATIONS: PROJECTS & PARTNERSHIPS / PROPERTY DEVELOPMENT & CONSTRUCTION

Completion may be the goal.
But are all parties working towards the same outcome?

The developer balances project vision, commercial viability and the experience of future users. The design team brings design ambitions, professional responsibilities and commercial interests. Contractors need clear decisions and workable sequences. Operators and occupiers need a development that works when the doors open.

A shared completion date does not, on its own, join those priorities together.

Let’s talk about your development

02 PROPERTY DEVELOPMENT & CONSTRUCTION / Delivery context

The decision is in the minutes.
Its consequences are still in separate conversations.

A design change has been agreed. The developer sees a better experience for future occupiers. The contractor sees an instruction whose scope is still unclear. A specialist subcontractor sees work that may have to be undone. The operator is wondering whether anyone has checked how the space will actually function.

Each group has a reasonable account of the decision. What’s missing is a shared understanding of what it now requires from them—and a way of raising important concerns before positions harden.

We bring those accounts into the same conversation, so groups can examine how their assumptions and decisions affect one another’s work—and agree what needs to change.

Five construction project representatives discussing plans during a tense meeting at an unfinished development

SCENARIO 1 OF 3

The vision survives the presentation. Does it survive the decisions?

Everyone endorsed the ambition. As cost plans, design and procurement develop, each group makes reasonable choices within its responsibilities but gradually protects a different version of the project.

Questions about value, scope and user experience become negotiations over whose priorities should give way. Relationships strain and decisions slow.

Differences in priorities go unexplored as the parties defend separate interpretations of the shared ambition.

SCENARIO 2 OF 3

The next package is ready. The workfront isn’t.

A specialist contractor has committed people and materials, but access depends on preceding work and an unanswered request for information. The developer is considering a change.

The main contractor needs a firm commitment; the specialist needs the conditions in place to make it achievable. Progress stalls; confidence between the groups weakens and conversations grow harder.

Each assumes someone else has the next decision in hand. Repeated promises and qualifications obscure what must be resolved together.

SCENARIO 3 OF 3

Practical completion is approaching. Opening is another conversation.

The construction team is closing out defects and preparing handover, while future occupiers plan fit-out and opening. The future occupiers request what they describe as “a few tiny changes”, with significant implications for work nearing completion.

The delivery team sees disruption—again. The operator sees an essential adjustment. As positions harden, each finds it increasingly difficult to accept the other’s perspective, raising the risk of confrontation.

Assumptions about readiness and use have never been worked through together. Frustration and blame now put cooperation and timely handover at risk.

04 PROPERTY DEVELOPMENT & CONSTRUCTION / HOW WE HELP

Bring the difficult conversations
into the work.

Concerns are easier to work with before positions harden. When frustration has already built up, people also need to be heard and the pressures they face recognised.

Our diagnostic conversations with the groups help us understand the history behind the parties’ accounts and where exchanges tend to break down. That understanding informs how we support the conversations: recognising when differences are being softened, questioning assumptions without dismissing legitimate responsibilities, and judging when to challenge an agreement that leaves the underlying issue untouched.

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05 PROPERTY DEVELOPMENT & CONSTRUCTION

What needs to work better between the parties on your development?

Start with the decision that keeps returning, the commitment that never quite holds, or the corridor conversations people are having separately. We’ll explore with you what’s happening between the groups involved and how we can help them move forward together.

Let’s talk

Prefer to call? +353 87 2445100

Completion may be the goal.But are all parties working towards the same outcome?

The decision is in the minutes. Its consequences are still in separate conversations.