For Gilbert Boustany, Vice President, Project Delivery at Chalhoub Group, the biggest differentiator in today’s construction industry isn’t speed, it’s clarity. He explains why better governance, stronger stakeholder alignment, and transparent decision-making have become the foundation of successful project delivery. Read it in his voice.
There’s a version of success in construction that almost everyone in the industry has chased at some point. It looks like speed. It sounds like, “We mobilised in 48 hours,” or, “We handed over two weeks early.” For a long time, that was the story told at industry dinners and written into company profiles. Fast meant capable. Fast won work.
But fast, on its own, is no longer worth chasing, and the construction projects struggling the most today prove exactly why. Not because timelines don’t matter. They do. A brand that misses its store opening after the marketing campaign has already launched doesn’t need anyone to explain what that costs. Timelines are real. Penalties are real. Nobody is pretending otherwise.
What’s equally real, though, is this: the teams consistently delivering successful projects, at scale and under pressure, are not the fastest ones in the room. They are the clearest.
I have sat in conversations that cost more than most people realise, not because of room rates or consultants’ fees, but because critical decisions should have been settled months earlier. A developer still working out what a space actually needed to do. A brand team that hadn’t reached internal alignment before the architect started drawing. A procurement model chosen in the very meeting where it should have been questioned.
In large-scale developments, ambiguity compounds quickly. There are more stakeholders, more interfaces, more contractors, and more handoffs. Unclear thinking at the top of a project doesn’t stay there. It travels. By the time it surfaces on site, it appears as a programme delay or a budget overrun. But it is rarely either of those things. More often, it is an information gap that was never closed.
The organisations succeeding today invest serious time and rigour at the front end through programming, briefing, and stakeholder alignment before a single appointment is made. That is not bureaucracy. That is protection.
THE GAPS NOBODY THOUGHT TO ASSIGN
One of the most common failure patterns I see has nothing to do with conflict between parties. It is the absence of ownership over the things nobody thought to assign. The space between one contractor’s scope and the next. The decision sitting unanswered in an email chain for three weeks. The risk everyone identified but nobody formally accepted.
The difference between a complex project that succeeds and one that doesn’t is almost always the quality of its governance: how clearly roles are defined, how quickly decisions are made, and how honestly problems are surfaced when they appear.
I’ve watched projects with extraordinary talent fail because the structure around those people was unclear. I’ve also seen projects with far more modest resources deliver exceptionally well because everyone knew exactly what they were responsible for and remained accountable to it.
THE THING NOBODY WANTS TO SAY OUT LOUD
This one is cultural, which makes it harder to address. There is still a tendency, particularly in this region, to manage upward by managing information. To smooth over early warning signs. To present a clean picture when the reality is far messier.
It’s understandable. Nobody wants to be the person who raises the alarm. But construction projects don’t collapse overnight. They erode slowly through a series of small decisions not to say what’s actually happening. By the time the problem becomes visible to everyone, the opportunity to recover has usually already passed.
The teams I trust most are the ones who bring problems forward early, with context and a proposed path to resolution. That takes far more courage than silence, and it is worth more than almost anything else a project delivery team can offer.
SPEED STILL MATTERS. JUST NOT BY ITSELF.
The market moves fast, and clients are right to expect responsiveness. But speed built on unclear briefs, fragmented accountability, and sanitised reporting isn’t a competitive advantage. It’s simply risk being carried forward, one programme update at a time.
The real competitive edge, the one that compounds across years, projects, and relationships, is the ability to create clarity from the outset and maintain it throughout project delivery.