​Client Overview

The client is a leading building construction company with over 5,000 employees, engaged as the general contractor on a 39-story mixed-use tower in the heart of a major downtown district. Given the site's visibility and the client's standing relationship with a well-known developer, the project carried significant strategic weight beyond its contract value.

 

The Situation

Construction of the tower fell behind schedule due to a combination of underperforming subcontractors, trade labor shortages, and most critically breakdowns in coordination and communication across the project team. As the delay grew, the contractor faced mounting exposure on several fronts:

• Liquidated damages tied directly to the contractual completion date

• Risk to the firm's future pipeline of work with a high-value, repeat client

• Reputational damage in a highly visible downtown market, where the project's progress was easily observed by competitors, media, and future clients

With schedule slippage compounding and no clear turnaround plan in place, the client engaged KARA Consults to take over project scheduling and controls, with a mandate to diagnose the root causes of the delay and stabilize the path to completion.

 

Initial Diagnosis

At the point of engagement, the project was 22 weeks behind the approved baseline schedule, and actual costs and overheads were trending well above the original budget. Rather than act on assumptions, KARA Consults' first move was evidence-based: the team collected and analyzed performance data including trade-level Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to confirm or rule out hypotheses about the source of the delay.

This diagnostic phase surfaced three distinct, compounding root causes:

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1. Late Design Turnaround from the Architect / Engineer

Unclear scope definition in the design documents was generating a high volume of Requests for Information (RFIs) from the contractor and its subcontractors. Field and engineering teams were losing substantial productive time waiting on design clarifications before work could proceed.

Response: KARA Consults directed the contractor and subcontractors to conduct a full design review and consolidate every outstanding clarification need. In parallel, the Architect/Engineer and client representative were brought into a structured cadence of weekly design workshops, run for approximately eight weeks, where the full project team sat together to resolve open items in real time. This gave the team clarity on current and upcoming design issues, cleared the RFI backlog, and eliminated the idle-time cost of engineers waiting on lengthy design responses.

 

2. Blockwork and MEP Misalignment Acting as a Bottleneck

KPI analysis across trades showed that blockwork and MEP (mechanical, electrical, plumbing) installation were both underperforming relative to the pace of other trades, effectively bottlenecking the project. Further investigation showed labor shortages in the blockwork trade were restricting the release of work fronts to the MEP team but even correcting that would not have been sufficient, since MEP's own KPIs indicated the team lacked the capacity to absorb additional work fronts regardless.

Response: For blockwork, KARA Consults proposed bringing on additional masonry subcontractors to remove the trade from the project's critical path. For MEP, a like-for-like staffing increase was judged impractical given the liability exposure during testing and commissioning of MEP systems. Instead, working with MEP subcontractor leadership, the team implemented a support plan:

• Stationed an additional MEP coordinator directly in the field to resolve spatial clashes in real time

• Provided additional material-handling and logistics support from the general contractor

• Engaged construction staffing agencies to source vetted, temporary journeymen and helpers to augment the core MEP crew

 

3. Weak and Impractical Schedule Implementation

Beyond the design and trade-specific issues, the project was operating in what the team characterized as a vague scheduling atmosphere: field crews were not engaging with look-ahead schedules or weekly targets. This is a common downstream symptom once a baseline schedule loses credibility in the field once dates are perceived as unreliable, crews stop planning around them, and that erosion of trust becomes as damaging to the schedule as any physical constraint.

Response: KARA Consults ran a series of high-priority scheduling workshops with all subcontractors, building the recovery schedule collaboratively rather than issuing it top-down. This ensured every date was coordinated, realistic, and owned by the trades responsible for hitting it. The result was a formal recovery schedule mapping the mitigation strategy and path forward, which the team then tracked and adjusted weekly. Field crews reported feeling more involved and better informed, and that engagement began surfacing obstacles earlier, before they could affect the critical path.

 

Results

The combined interventions did not fully eliminate the original delay, but they sharply reduced it from 22 weeks behind schedule down to 4 weeks, while establishing a credible, trade-endorsed recovery schedule and a data-driven weekly tracking rhythm that gave the client visibility and control going forward.

• Delay reduced from 22 weeks to 4 weeks (an 82% recovery)

• RFI backlog cleared and design-clarification cycle time significantly shortened

• Blockwork removed from the critical path through targeted subcontractor augmentation

• MEP work-front capacity increased without introducing testing and commissioning risk

• Restored field-level trust in the schedule, improving crew engagement and early problem visibility

 

Why It Worked?

The turnaround was driven by three disciplines that KARA Consults applies to distressed projects: diagnosing root causes with trade-level KPI data rather than anecdote, matching each intervention to the specific constraint it targeted (design, labor, or trust) instead of applying a single fix across the board, and rebuilding the schedule collaboratively with the trades who would be held to it, so the recovery plan carried credibility in the field from day one.