By Andy Monteith, head of construction at Baker Tilly

“This project is over budget, we aren’t going to deliver on time and the customer is not happy with us”.

This is an all too familiar statement when our clients ask us to identify process and control breakdown within projects which are not going to plan.

But is it always the fault of the Project Director failing to deliver the project, or even the Quantity Surveyor who has been unable to effectively manage the budgets? When projects go wrong too many construction firms fail to challenge themselves on the root cause of the issue. The elephant in the room is often that the opportunity was always too risky or the bid price was based on achieving subcontractor or value engineering savings that were unrealistic.

Recent research by MarketingWorks and the University of Reading suggested that for contracts between £2m - £250m the average cost of winning was £60,208 in 2014. As a proportion of the overall contract value, bid costs can be as high as 1.2 per cent. The level of investment into bidding for new projects is, therefore, significant yet it is an area where processes are often not adequately defined and controls are not robust. The implications of bidding for the wrong project or choosing the wrong contract price can be significantly more severe, as recently high profile examples have highlighted.

For many internal audit functions the amount of effort spent focusing on this area remains surprisingly low, instead deciding to concentrate on ‘live’ projects. Our experience has identified that those construction firms with the fewest ‘problem child’ projects are those with a robust bid management process together with an inclusive and collaborative culture. An Internal Audit function should consider how it can play a more proactive role in mitigating contract risk, right at the beginning of the project lifecycle, rather than once things have started to go wrong.

What should you consider when reviewing this area?

Internal audit functions should also consider whether they have the skills and expertise to sufficiently challenge the business. High performing Internal Audit functions use internal or external subject matter experts to support in reviewing this area. Examples include commercial specialists, quantity surveyors and project managers.

Seeking advice to help you identify weaknesses within your bid management and estimating and tendering processes could well pay dividends.