In the course of my more than 15 years of experience as an attorney, I’ve worked on billions of dollars’ worth of public construction projects, and I’ve seen them succeed and fail.

The failures have sometimes been from conditions that were not foreseeable, but often have been from predictable issues that recur with shocking frequency. The reason for this is simple: With public projects, the persons that are responsible for the project approvals and outcomes, at the highest levels, are typically elected or appointed officials that have little previous experience with construction, much less with managing a multimillion-dollar project. Elected and appointed officials are often unwilling to acknowledge their lack of expertise, and instead plow forward with projects that have major potential defects - or at the very least, that have not been fully considered and optimized.

The general lack of prior experience that many public officials have, when properly acknowledged, can be a great asset, rather than a significant detriment. How is that so? When you come into a project without the burden of prior assumptions based on previous project experience, you can reenvision what a successful project should be, and what your goals should be. Learn from an exploration of projects that were successful and projects that failed, and learn the practical steps to managing a successful public construction project.