Relationship Health Is Becoming a Delivery Discipline in Infrastructure Projects

PMI’s Pulse of the Profession® 2026 found that 81%  of project professionals say projects have become more complex in recent years. In construction and infrastructure, that complexity increasingly sits in the relationships between the organizations that deliver the work: owners, contractors, designers, suppliers, regulators, technology partners and public bodies.

This matches what I see across the construction and infrastructure programs I work with every week. The story is not simply that projects are getting bigger. It is that delivery has become more dispersed. The web of organizations through which a major project gets delivered has expanded to a point where no single organization can command it end to end. Yet much of the way we assure these projects still assumes that cost, schedule and technical risk are the primary variables to govern.

This is the problem that Designed to Deliver, PMI's new research with MIGSO-PCUBED and University College London, examines. The report reframes relationship health as a delivery discipline: one that should be designed, governed, measured and escalated with the same rigor as cost, schedule, scope and technical risk. Yet collaboration in major infrastructure projects is too often managed as an informal, unquantified variable. That asymmetry is not a cultural inconvenience. It is a governance failure, and one of the most under-managed sources of delivery risk.

Why relationship health matters more now

The point is not that relationships suddenly matter. They always have. What has changed is the delivery environment around them. Construction and infrastructure projects are becoming larger, more fragmented, more specialized and more interdependent. That is not an isolated issue; it is a structural change in how major projects are delivered. Six dynamics are pushing relationship health closer to the center of delivery.

1. The pipeline is more complex than it was a decade ago

McKinsey's 2024 analysis of 86,000 large construction projects across 91 countries found that brownfield projects rose from 13% of the pipeline in 2012 to 22% in 2022. Brownfield work takes place in constrained sites, in and around existing operations, with more interfaces, more stakeholders and more ways for site conditions, operational constraints and organization dependencies to disrupt the plan. It is measurably harder to deliver, with profit margins more than 40 percent lower than greenfield equivalents.

The consequences are visible in the aggregate numbers. A 2019 study of 2,700 construction projects found that 44% ended at a loss. Global construction labor productivity has grown just 0.4% per year over the past two decades, compared with 2% for the total economy and 3% for manufacturing. Complexity is outpacing the industry's ability to absorb it through traditional delivery controls alone.

2. The supply chain has become the sustainability boundary

For most construction and property businesses, Scope 3 emissions now account for 90% to 98% of the total carbon footprint. That means the decarbonization math for any given asset sits almost entirely with suppliers the prime contractor does not directly control. Meeting a client's net-zero commitment is therefore not only an operational discipline, but a relational one.

Whether a supplier will share embodied carbon data, adopt low-carbon concrete or coordinate on a common environmental product declaration standard depends on more than the contract. It depends on whether the relationship model creates trust, transparency, shared expectations and incentives that make collaboration rational. In this context, the supply chain is not just a procurement channel. It is the sustainability boundary.

3. The workforce challenge is also a capability transfer problem

Global construction spending is projected to grow from US$13 trillion in 2023 to $22 trillion by 2040. McKinsey and the World Economic Forum put the total infrastructure investment need over that period at US$106 trillion, including $36 trillion for transport, $23 trillion for energy and $19 trillion for digital infrastructure.

At the same time, 41% of the US construction workforce is expected to retire by 2031. The UK sector is expected to lose about a quarter of its workforce within 15 years. JLL projects 2.1 million skilled trades jobs will remain unfilled by 2030, with potential economic losses of US$1 trillion annually.

This is not only a labor supply problem. It is a capability transfer problem. As experienced people leave the industry, organizations risk losing the informal knowledge that holds complex delivery ecosystems together: who to call, how to escalate, when to challenge, how to interpret early signs of relational strain and how to resolve issues before they become claims. Watching senior figures retire from projects I have worked on over the years, this is the loss that concerns me most, because it is the hardest to replace and the easiest to overlook until it is gone.

As experienced people retire faster than they can be replaced, more delivery gets pushed further down the subcontractor tier. The prime contractor's relationship with the third or fourth-tier firm doing the actual work becomes progressively more consequential and progressively harder to actively manage. Senior leadership turnover, once treated mainly as a personnel event, should increasingly be treated as a relationship risk event.

4. New roles are creating new interfaces

VDC coordinators, prefabrication technicians, embodied carbon specialists and digital twin engineers were peripheral or non-existent ten years ago. Today, they can sit on the critical path on complex projects. They may work in different firms, report to different leaders and speak different professional languages. Each new specialty adds a new interface, and each new interface is a place where the relationship can either accelerate or degrade delivery.

5. Regulation is intensifying at the interface

The WEF estimates that over 80% of the buildings that will exist in 2050 in the EU have already been constructed, which means the compliance load falls disproportionately on retrofit, where interface density is already highest.

The EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, jurisdictional variation across markets, and rising client sustainability expectations all sit above any single organization in the delivery chain. They can only be met through the relationships between organizations. Compliance depends not just on what each party knows, but on whether they can coordinate, disclose, adapt and solve problems together.

6. Technology is adding visibility but not alignment

Between 2020 and 2022, venture capital and private equity funds invested US$50 billion in AEC technologies, 85% more than the three years prior. Indian construction firms now use an average of 7.5 different technologies. According to a recent Deloitte survey of APAC headquartered construction firms, 94% of firms plan to incorporate AI. Yet construction remains near the bottom of major industries in digitization, and interoperability between platforms remains poor.

Technology is therefore not simplifying the ecosystem by itself. In many cases, it is adding new interfaces that must be governed. Every platform, dashboard, digital twin, AI tool or data environment creates another point where information must move across organizational boundaries. Without common ways of working, shared expectations and trust in the data, more tools generate more visibility without improving alignment.

The capability gap is not technical. It is relational.

Put all six dynamics together, and the pattern becomes clear. The capability gap facing construction is often described in terms of technical skills, labor shortages or digital adoption. Those gaps are real. But Designed to Deliver points to a deeper issue: many organizations have not built the capability to design and manage the relationships their projects depend on.

Most leaders do not need to be convinced that collaboration matters. In three decades of construction delivery, I have yet to meet a senior leader who does not believe in it. What they need is a way to make collaboration operational: selecting partners for relational competence, aligning contracts to the relationship model required, building leadership behaviors into delivery assurance, measuring relationship health and intervening before deterioration becomes a project crisis.

In other words, the future construction capability gap is not only about whether people can manage projects. It is whether organizations can build project ecosystems capable of working together under pressure.

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