The overwhelming majority of construction project failure litigation pertains to homeowner complaints of defects and delay claims in the ‘home improvement sector.’ For the most part, those guilty are small-time contractors servicing projects below the radar. I.e., private homes, apartments, and other one-offs, in a rat race that’s well nigh impossible to monitor and regulate. Yet, so-called ‘big-time’ contractors seem to deliver the same abject misery as home improvement contractors – it’s just branded differently – think ‘horse manure as compared to elephant plop.’

‘Let’s take the mystery out of project failure. They fail according to their prescribed destiny: projects are ‘born bad’ out of ill-conception and bad faith more often than they ‘turn bad’ – you just need to look for the writing on the wall. This is true in construction as it is any industry or commercial project.

With more at stake in the large-scale general building industry, perpetual project failure gives it a well deserved blemished reputation that should give anyone pause: contractors of every stripe fail as a consequence of ineptitude and ignorance, duplicity and sleight of hand – or both, as much as ever. Perhaps that’s why the term ‘racket’ endures as it has since the early 19th century. Even project teams that have great resources are powerless to overcome the team-failure.

‘If you take off the blinders lay-people wear, they would see that the design industry equally shares the blame in project failure – often is the source of conflict, in the great travails and misfortunes of the building industry.

Theories abound, yet none seem to ameliorate the chronic lethargy and greed that is a birthright of the industry project failure: we expect builders to fail. A plethora of data and ‘disruptive’ technology do not impact performance, despite the ‘millennial Pollyannism of software developers. That’s because the building industry maintains a natural antipathy to technology. If we pair this delinquency with a dearth of skilled labor, we cook up a perfect storm of industry inadequacy and decrepitude. And the disconnect between developers and industry realities is too wide to negotiate with any sense of rationality.

‘You know what – shove that BIM file – I’d rather see mylar overlays than a designer’s impotent efforts to coordinate engineering drawings with his own caricatures.

Before we place all the blame of project failure on hapless or contemptible contractors, we must not forget the underperforming, stuck-up-bung design industry whose job it is to facilitate builders with ‘constructible drawings’ – an oxymoron if ever there was. Despite the hype, BIM has not turned out to be the coordination panacea dream it was promised to be: in fact, since mainstreaming of BIM , designers and engineers expect to do less, and rely on BIM to design the project for them. The result is that designs are more loosely coordinated than they were before BIM.

‘In negotiated bids, contractors suck up to, and provide cover for their interior designers. This severely truncates the shelf life of their project managers whom they expect to wear out their knee-pads in subservient suck-up . Never again, Derek!

Like any software, BIM only does what operators tell it to do. There is no autopilot. But what if, for intensive purposes, most BIM operators couldn’t overlay a single storey dog-house? That notion doesn’t seem to perturb designers who overinvest in the technology, blaming the BIM operators for their own design shortcomings, and expecting contractor sketchers to take up the slack, or rather – do their design work for them. That’s both wrong-minded and arrogant.

A project shouldn’t be a ‘dance of death,’ but then clueless designers always have full dance cards.

The flipside of this communal ignorance is dishonesty and treachery that some contractors embrace as ‘high art form’ – replete with codes for jacked up billable hours – such as the ‘8 and 2.’ or the game of ‘who can wear the crown of ‘king racketeer?’ Indeed, the industry is steeped in organized crime. Such trespasses have nothing to do with building proper, but the facilitation and management of it, including posing as MBE/WBE. In other words, rip-offs on a grand scale persevere regardless of work being performed, or not. Posing as an MWBE contractor is both insidious and un-American.

‘When grifter contractors successfully plead their case to the courts, they are granted a windfall slap on the wrist. What kind of justice is that?

The contractor and construction manager who is both inept and corrupt is the ‘piece de resistance’ of the industry: he who both over-bills the client, while at the same time delivers a substandard product. Sad to say, this hybrid is far too common to be considered an aberrance – it is often the rule, not the exception.

I have no explanation to what impels so many contractors to be negligent, dishonest, or both. Ineptitude can be thought of as a behavioral imperfection: if you’re no good at what you do, you shouldn’t press on, but cease and desist. That’s easy to do. But for the grifters, the fruits of their misdeeds and overcharges are too bountiful to pass up. These are simply contemptible people who lack morals. .

It’s certainly a toss-up: is it the corrupt contractor, or the inept one, who populates the court calendars. Corrupt contractors can make a choice not to be so. Inept general contractors often can’t help themselves. They may lack the infrastructure to deliver quality, or they may lack a following: quality vendors and subs with whom they enjoy a mutually amicable relationship.

In my nine years as a court expert witness, I have seen my share of butchered projects, and provided my expert opinions for countless litigation. Very few of these went to trial, and with good reason. But larger fish – the big pariah contractors seldom go to trial, rather they settle for pennies on the dollar. That’s as unfair to the industry as it is un-American. The pervasiveness of criminality in the industry shakes out the number of honest and competent contractors to an infinitesimal aggregate that can be tallied on one hand.

For my money, I am only ever interested in job prospects that fall into this latter category. The rest of them can find like-minded employees within the post-correctional facility placement programs.