Why does Agile Methodology not work very well in construction project management?

Karolline Dutra
Jan 6, 2022
3 min read

Updated: Aug 7, 2023

Agile Methodology has been increasingly talked about among the means related to project management. But everything changes when we talk about construction. Is this method suitable for this environment?

Agile is an iterative approach to project management and software development that helps teams deliver value to their customers faster, delivering work in small, but consumable, increments, instead of delivering everything at once near the end. Instead, Predictive is the traditional, or waterfall project management, in which the scope of work and requirements for the project are clear and justify the detailed upfront planning, with a defined final project, where the team delivers it all in the end.

As far as we know, construction is not a constantly changing environment. When you are building a house, you’re not going to do the plumbing and test it, and then do it again several times. You must install it once, as well the electrical system, among others. You don’t keep successively updating the pipes or the cabling, but do it the one time. By the way, changes cost a lot in construction, and after this, we have the Change Control Process to manage it. Thus, when building a house, you know what the end product is and all the tasks that need to be done in between.

That is to say, in a Predictive environment, you generally perform the work once, even testing the work. You don’t repeat the work over and over again until getting it right. On the other hand, Agile works in a continuous change of work environment, in which you every 2 to 4 weeks have a new small project, which is known as Sprints. This way, Agile will be continually repaired while Predictive will be a well-understood project.

I had my own experience trying a fully Agile Methodology on a construction project at a company I worked with years ago. We tested this model for a while, even did daily stand-up meetings and guess what? It didn't work very well, as this is a completely different environment for which Agile is not suited. In this experience, the daily rates did not make any sense because we didn't have to make changes to the construction site every day and to complement the schedule, it was already done from the beginning of the project.

We are not talking about software development or mobile phone development which your requirements need to constantly be updated and your clients need to constantly change — which is a constantly changing business environment. However, a construction project is about a building that needs strong planning from the beginning to the end, with a final product defined.

This does not mean that you can’t have weekly meetings or update your client about what is happening. Because of it, we have daily or weekly reports. But you can’t use the common Agile methodologies during a construction execution project for example, because you already have a defined project. However, we can adopt a Hybrid model, mixing the traditional plan-driven model (Predictive) and the change-driven model (Agile), from the initiation stage to the closure stage of the construction project management, and we even can use Lean Methodology, but this is a subject for an next article.

Therefore, a fully Agile model is not going to work very well in a construction project because it’s not a constantly changing environment. As also it is not going to work very well in every industry, every situation.

Do you have questions about the subject or do you want to get a good project management of your construction? Contact us for more information.

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