Construction Tracks Everything Except Its Most Dangerous Risk

By Jacky Wong and Kevin Le

To the builders, developers, and government leaders shaping our cities: 

Design risk is the single most expensive unmeasured problem in Australian construction. It ends careers, wipes out developer returns, and invites regulatory scrutiny. Yet, for all the dashboards the industry generates, there is almost never a single, live source of truth for design risk itself. 

We have invested heavily in BIM to keep design, quantities, and documentation in sync. However, on most projects, the commercial meaning of change and its impact on scope, cost, and risk remains disconnected from the model. Instead of a system, we rely on an audit trail of RFIs, reports and ‘lessons learned’ created after the damage is done. 

We see the cost of this disconnect playing out in the headlines every week. From the Metro tunnels in Sydney and Melbourne to hospitals in Queensland; major infrastructure projects are facing billions in blowouts. While the scale differs, the root cause is often the same: design evolution outpaced the controls. 

If a $20-billion government project struggles to track the commercial impact of design coordination, what chance does a $200-million residential tower have using the same manual spreadsheets? 

It highlights a dangerous double standard. No builder or developer would accept a major project without a detailed cost plan or a safety management system. These are hygienic controls. Yet we routinely accept design risk spread across dozens of unconnected artefacts.

‘Impossible to defend’

Informal coordination meetings and email chains are not a strategy. Regulators across Australia are tightening scrutiny on how designs are produced, coordinated, and certified, with NSW’s Design and Building Practitioners Act showing just how formal those obligations can become. Treating design risk as an afterthought is becoming impossible to defend. 

It is time to elevate design management to the same status as cost and program controls. 

While the industry relies on rigorous systems for the budget and schedule, design risk management remains a blind spot. 

We cannot manage this level of exposure using static PDF mark-ups and email chains. The solution is a live Design Risk Register—a live, single source of truth that ensures every scope gap and design risk is tracked, owned, priced and resolved. 

A robust system must automatically answer three fundamental questions:

• What is unresolved? (The specific clash or scope gap)

• What is the impact? (The commercial exposure)

• Who is responsible? (The actionable owner) 

When you bridge the gap between design intent and commercial reality, you stop betting your margin on every drawing change and start calling the odds. This transforms an unstructured stream of information into a disciplined view of exposure. 

CIM Build is currently deploying this standard. If you would like to see how this can be achieved on live commercial projects today, submit a request on https://cim.build/contact.

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