There's a conversation that happens on almost every mid-to-large project in Australia. It usually starts somewhere around the CC phase, when the first RFI log hits double digits and someone — usually the site manager or the contracts administrator — says it out loud:
"Why can't these consultants just talk to each other?"
It's one of the most repeated complaints in the industry. And it's also one of the most misdiagnosed.
Because the problem isn't that consultants don't want to coordinate. It's that the conditions for coordination are never actually created. Builders inherit a fragmented consultant structure, assume it will self-manage, and then spend the next twelve months firefighting the fallout.
The Myth of "Consultant Coordination"
When a builder or developer appoints a design team, there's an implicit assumption baked into the contract structure: that because these people are all professionals, and because they're all working on the same project, coordination will happen naturally.
It doesn't.
What actually happens is that each consultant firm is managing multiple projects simultaneously, billing against hourly rates or lump-sum fees that were carved to the bone at tender, and responding to whoever is making the most noise at any given moment. There is no shared delivery plan. There is no agreed coordination protocol. There is no single person accountable for cross-discipline clash.
There's a meeting — usually called a "design coordination meeting" — that happens fortnightly, produces minutes nobody acts on, and gives everyone the impression that coordination is occurring.
It is not.
The Structural Problem Nobody Wants to Name
Here's what actually drives poor coordination, and why it keeps repeating project after project.
Consultants are appointed in silos. The architect is appointed first. The structural engineer follows. Services consultants — mechanical, electrical, hydraulic — come on board at different stages, often when design is already partially locked in. Each appointment has its own scope, its own deliverable schedule, and its own fee. None of these scopes are written to mandate coordination outputs. They mandate drawings. There's a difference.
The fee structure punishes coordination. A mechanical engineer who spends two days resolving ceiling plenum conflicts with the structural engineer is not billing that time productively against their deliverable schedule. Coordination is overhead. When fees are tight — and they always are — overhead gets quietly de-prioritised.
There is no nominated lead. The architect is often assumed to fill this role by default. But unless the appointment explicitly defines design coordination leadership — including responsibility for issuing a coordinated model, resolving cross-discipline clashes, and managing design freeze milestones — the architect will treat their scope as their scope. Full stop.
No one owns the programme. Consultant design programmes, when they exist at all, are produced in isolation. The structural engineer's programme doesn't reference the services consultant's programme. Nobody has mapped the critical path between IFC structural documentation and the mechanical engineer's clash resolution window. When one discipline slips, the downstream impact is invisible until it's already a problem on site.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Picture this: you're six weeks into a CC period on a twelve-storey mixed-use project. The structural engineer has issued basement drawings for construction. The hydraulic engineer hasn't yet coordinated their below-slab drainage with the structural slab penetrations. The mechanical engineer is still in concept for Level 3 and above.
Meanwhile, the builder's procurement team is trying to lock in the hydraulic subcontractor. The structural subcontractor is asking for confirmation on slab edge setouts. And site is starting in four weeks on the basement.
This is not a hypothetical. This is every week on a thousand sites across NSW.
The cost of that uncoordinated period isn't just RFIs and delays. It's variation claims. It's subcontractor delays with legitimate grounds for extension of time. It's provisional sums that never close. It's a project that bleeds money quietly, in a hundred small decisions made without proper information.
As construction management academic and author Glenn Ballard observed in the context of design production systems: "The root cause of most construction waste is decisions made without the information needed to make them well." Poor design coordination is precisely that — a factory for uninformed decisions.
Why Builders Keep Getting Burned
The honest answer is that builders accept risk they don't fully price.
During tender, the design documentation is assessed for buildability and completeness. But rarely does a tendering builder produce a detailed coordination risk register — mapping which disciplines are unresolved, what decisions are still outstanding, and where the clashes are most likely to emerge. That work is hard, it's time-consuming, and it doesn't feel like it belongs in the tender phase.
By the time the contract is signed and the project is mobilised, those unresolved coordination issues become the builder's operational reality. The consultants are still under their original appointments, with their original fee expectations. Nobody budgeted for the coordination work that's now required. And the builder — who has the most commercial exposure — has no direct lever to pull.
This is the core dynamic. The builder carries the risk. The consultants hold the information. And there's no structure in place to close that gap efficiently.
What Effective Design Management Actually Looks Like
The builders who manage this well do a few things differently.
They appoint a design manager — internal or external — who operates as a genuine coordination lead, not just a meeting chair. This person owns the design programme, issues action-based meeting minutes with deadlines, escalates non-performance, and maintains a live decision register.
They build coordination requirements into consultant briefs and novation deeds before the project starts, not after. This includes specifying model coordination milestones, clash detection obligations, and cross-discipline sign-off protocols tied to payment milestones.
They treat the CC-to-IFC transition as a critical project milestone — not a date on a programme that consultants will get to when they get to it. They run structured package reviews that test whether documentation is genuinely construction-ready before it reaches the field.
And they understand that under the Design and Building Practitioners Act 2020 (NSW), the compliance obligations sitting behind that documentation — the declarations, the design registrations, the regulated design pathway — require a level of coordinated intent that can't be achieved by consultants working in silos. The DBP Act didn't create a new problem. It just made an old one visible.
"Systems thinking tells us that a problem which appears in one place is almost always caused by structure, not by individual failure," noted Peter Senge in The Fifth Discipline — a principle that maps directly onto the design coordination problem in construction. The structure is broken. Blaming individual consultants is missing the point.
The Takeaway
Most of these failures share a root cause: builders treating the DBP Act as a compliance layer bolted onto the outside of their normal delivery process, rather than integrating it into how projects are sequenced and managed from day one. The regulated design framework was deliberately designed to shift responsibility and liability upstream and onto the practitioners doing the work. That shift is real, and it has teeth.
The builders who navigate it well are the ones who treat consultant coordination, portal lodgement, and declaration management as core delivery functions — not an afterthought for the DA manager or the certifier to clean up.
"The root cause of most construction waste is decisions made without the information needed to make them well."
- Glenn Ballard (Lean Construction Institute, UC Berkeley)
