In your leader (3 June, page 3), you ask of the Wembley Stadium problem: “Where did Multiplex go wrong?” May I also add: “And why should we find out now?” There are two possible answers.

It is possible that the directors have known all along about the likelihood of delayed completion and a £45m loss, and have only been waiting for a convenient moment to depreciate the share price and lose their jobs. That may be considered unlikely. The second possibility is that it has all come as a nasty surprise.

The effect of the problems on out-turn cost and completion date has come as a surprise to the directors because of the mistaken belief that competent critical path project planning,

and honest programme updating as events occur, is unnecessary and expensive and dilutes bargaining power in the event of a dispute. Nothing could be further from the truth. Apart from the final delay to completion, the published £45m loss in this case will be about half of what it will actually cost in the many disputes that are in train or will follow. Each will take up several lawyers and experts on either side, not to mention the management time that will be taken up to see it all through. The cost of competent project planning would have worked out at about 0.01% of that, at most.

The Wembley Stadium debacle has been seen so many times before it is hardly worth commenting upon: consider for example, the Millennium Stadium, Holyrood, the Great Eastern Hotel, the British Library, the Jubilee Line, the Royal Brompton Hospital, Portcullis House and those thousands of other, less high-profile projects that have also “gone wrong” – sometimes costing people their life savings as well as their jobs.

It will continue to happen until employers and contractors in the UK understand what was identified by the SCL Protocol and has been recognised by the US government and its contractors for 30 years or more: a competent dynamic critical path programme is not a piece of paper to be used for papering over the cracks in management competence until there is a dispute about compensation. It is an essential tool for predicting the consequence of change, in its broadest sense, at a time when delay to progress can be addressed and there is still time to institute productive recovery measures to overcome, or avoid, the predicted consequences.

Keith Pickavance, chairman, Pickavance Consulting

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