The costs of bad Interface management

"Simple" projects have one contract awarded - one contractor will perform all the work, possibly with one or many subcontractors.
As complexity increases, some companies prefer to continue to award all the work to one main contractor, and let them manage the complexity of all the other subcontracts and other stakeholders...
Which is fine - until you realise that the main contractor will (must?) add 10-20% to the contract cost, to cover all the additional stakeholder management - and RISK - and the need to have people in-house that understand at least some of what it is that the subcontractors are doing.

This has led (sometimes) inexperienced companies to see that they can save BIG money if they split the work between multiple main contractors - which may be true, but only if they invest in the people and processes to manage interfaces. (see also our article on contract alignment).
If the investment is not made in experienced interface managers, and the infrastructure that comes with them, then the financial gains can turn into enormous losses.

We have used several examples of "how not to do it" in speeches at conferences over the years:

Berlin Brandenburg Airport

The "owner/operator" for this project was the local authority - which had no real experience of large projects. The project was split into separate scopes of work, but the contractors had no way of communicating effectively with each other.
Roles and Responsibilities were not clear.
There was unclear Scope of Work, and undefined interfaces between multiple stakeholders.
There was immature design (for example, a smoke control system that did not work as intended).
The airport opened in October 2020 - nearly 9 years late.

Mars Climate Orbiter

Great planning, great spacecraft, great takeoff, great journey to Mars... Crashed into Mars
Orbital insertion data was passed between two teams, not realising that one was using pound-seconds while the other used newton-seconds.
Complete failure to communicate effectively.
Total loss.

Channel Tunnel

A great piece of infrastructure between the UK and France now, but the original company went broke because of costs and complexities during the project phase.
Ten contractors in a consortium. Two owner/operators, one each side of the channel, reporting to their governments. Undefined and changing requirements. The tunnel opened a year late and 100% over budget, at a time of high interest rates.

So what does good interface management look like?

Ask us - it is one of our core skills

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