Insights
Practical guidance on capital projects, governance, financing, and delivery for Indigenous and public-sector leaders.
Reporting demands rise every year, overhead funding does not, and the gap is filled by one tired program manager at nine at night. The squeeze is real — and underneath, it is a records problem.
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On paper a change order is simple: the work changed, so the price and schedule change, everyone signs. In practice it spends most of its life doing nothing. Here is where the days actually go.
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We think we keep records to remember what we did. The real reason is stranger: a record is how a decision survives the people who made it — and the part that fades first is the why.
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Ontario's new Peter Gilgan Hospital is running about $4 billion over budget, and the announced $13.9-billion contract isn't even the full cost. For a health authority board, the real number lives in the records - and so does the story of how it got there.
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B.C.'s timber harvest has nearly halved since 2014, and the sector is under pressure. In a tightening market, the operators who keep cutting are the ones whose permits, plans and compliance records are in order - because a forest tenure is a chain of records before it is a right to harvest.
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Canada's first national infrastructure assessment found $126 billion of public infrastructure in poor or very poor condition. Behind that number is a quieter problem every council already feels: you cannot renew what you cannot see.
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Rework eats 5 to 8 percent of a project's value, and most of it traces back to one thing: someone building from a document that was no longer current. For an engineering or architecture firm, the record isn't overhead - it's the product.
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They did the work. They helped the people the grant was meant to help. Two years later they wrote a cheque sending part of the money back, because the file could not prove what the team knew was true.
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A records request is a deadline you didn't choose, attached to documents you didn't organize for this moment. The teams who answer them calmly did the real work months before the request ever arrived.
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A development project is not land and concrete. To everyone who has to fund it, insure it or buy it, the project is a stack of documents. When the stack has a hole, the deal stops — no matter how good the dirt is.
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When you need to know the current, real answer on a project, where do you actually look? For most teams the honest answer is email — which happens to be the one place the answer is least likely to be right.
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Every team believes it knows where everything is. Almost none of them have ever tested it. The gap between the confidence and the reality is not laziness — it is the most comfortable, expensive myth in any organization.
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