For Complex Infrastructure Projects, Teaming is All About Timing

According to a 2025 Design-Build Utilization Study, design-build is projected to represent over 47% of US construction spending by 2028, to total more than $1.1 trillion. With projects of this scale and complexity it is critical to identify the sequencing and skills that determine success and prevent cost risk. Over the years, design build projects have learned (sometimes the difficult, costly way), to plan for things like lighting integration before building walls. The lesson now is that owners must build for the customer experience the prime contractor promises to create long before breaking ground. This requires rethinking when to bring in specialist firms on complex infrastructure projects.

The promise of world-class experience underscores every recent airport and transportation infrastructure project. Keeping that promise depends on setting the right cross-functional teams from the start. It calls for ensuring collaboration among subcontractors and prime contractors around a shared customer experience strategy at every phase of the design build process.

Design-Bid-Build vs. Design-Build: Finding the Most Efficient Way to Deliver Value

The numbers are clear. Engaging with specialized partners early in the design-build process yields improved results for on-time, in-budget delivery. A Construction Industry Institute and the Pankow Foundation peer-reviewed study of 212 completed projects, aggregated in DBIA’s 2025 Design-Build Data Sourcebook, reveals design-build projects are completed 102% faster than traditional design-bid-build.  Notably, design-build projects finish 3.8% closer to their originally contracted budget than design-bid-build projects.

In the traditional (dare we say, “old school”) scenario of design-bid-build, the owner hires a designer (either an engineering firm or architect) under one contract. Then, that contracted firm completes the design. Only once the design is substantially complete does the owner solicit construction bids. After receipt of those bids, the owner awards a separate contract. Design and construction, in this setup, are held by two different entities. They are run in sequence, separated by a procurement gap.

Functionally, this means any problems discovered during construction that trace back to design decisions require the owner to go back to the designer, across contract lines. This scenario frequently (and understandably) results in disputes around responsibility and cost.

In the design-build scenario, a single entity (typically a prime contractor leading an integrated team) holds responsibility for design and construction under one contract. This works because it accounts for the overlap between design and construction. The design-build structure facilitates the inclusion of specialized experts like customer experience throughout the project. The entire team is present during design decisions. Specialty subcontractors voice recommendations and guidance as part of the design development process.

This means the prime contractor gets to leverage specialists’ expertise to shape the project toward its shared goals. In this environment, when a problem surfaces, the team unties to resolve it without having to attempt to work across contract boundaries. The result is key players engaged at the right time, adding the most value.

How to Think Differently About Teaming to Meet New Needs

While innovative approaches to design-build projects are emerging, team structuring needs to improve. We continue to see projects in which prime contractors build delivery teams according to the old design-bid-build model. The dominant approach in those cases is to identify specialist subcontractors like our firm after contract award. We come in once the design is already underway.

This timing restricts specialist subcontractors to a narrow, often, reactive scope. In the new era that mandates world-class experiences, we need to integrate specialist disciplines earlier. And to invite those disciplines to voice recommendations in the design process itself. This is the surest way to achieve on-time, in-budget delivery and to build an authentically world-class experience.

Bringing Specialist Subcontractors and Prime Contractors into the Future

To build for the future, it is worth noting the internal organizational structure of prime contractors and the design of the RFP process itself. Prime contractors structure their internal organization around the disciplines that win and manage the contract. Typically, these disciplines have included engineering, architecture, program management, and the project controls infrastructure that supports them. That is where the headcount lives. It is where institutional knowledge compounds. And, ultimately, it is the source of the firm’s competitive identity.

Conversely, prime contractors typically are not structured around specialty disciplines like wayfinding strategy, passenger experience design, or customer journey architecture. Increasingly, these capabilities appear as scored evaluation criteria in public-sector RFPs, particularly for transit and aviation projects. That makes this an ideal time for prime contractors like engineering firms to create productive, collaborative relationships with specialist partners who fill in-house capability gaps.

The economics of filling the gap with an external provider are easy to see. Building genuine depth in a specialty like customer experience design from scratch inside a large engineering firm is slow and expensive. And the result rarely produces the same level of confidence on the part of the RFP evaluator that the inclusion of a firm that is purpose-built according to a specialty that adds value to a project does.

What we have seen, too often, across transit, aviation, and other mixed-use public infrastructure projects, is that the customer experience component gets designated as the deliverable that can be addressed later down the line, after the engineering is settled. This assumption is incorrect. It drives up costs, slows down timelines, and undermines the team’s ability to deliver on world-class promises.

The Real Cost of Getting in Late

Waiting to include specialist teams until late in the project is a demonstrable project risk. Design-related errors link to 1–9% of total project cost across multiple studies, according to a 2025 analysis of construction rework costs. Remember, we are talking about mega-projects with high budgets. Even at a 1% increase, on a $500 million transit project, that is $5 million in avoidable expenditure. At 9%, the number becomes seriously consequential to a firm’s project P&L.

Let’s look more at how those costs add up. Miscommunication drives 26% of all construction rework. Inaccurate data accounts for another 14–22%. Think information that should have been gathered when all the teams were in the room together, early in the project. These numbers show the majority of rework is the result of information failures. Successful projects need documented insights. Insights that are accessible to the entire project team as an output of authentic interdisciplinary conversations. And drive collaborative decision-making.

Customer experience experts need to be in the room with the designer early to make customer-centric, world-class design a reality.

What Getting in Early Looks Like in Practice for Infrastructure Projects

Across our work in public infrastructure, a pattern comes up consistently. Early specialized involvement changes project outcomes for the better. Teams work more nimbly and creatively driving everything from modernization at airports to seamlessness at transportation hubs.

The energy and creativity of working with a team from early infrastructure projects through breaking ground and beyond means the experience of customers, passengers, and partners is clearly defined. And universally protected across every phase of the design-build process. Collaboration from the first stages of the projects enable owners to reap the breadth of benefits of the experts they bring into a project. It empowers them to deliver on their promises.

In our experience, we have also seen the opposite pattern. Pursuits where the specialized partner had no defined scope, no access to key owner conversations, and no structured opportunity to contribute in meaningful ways. In those cases, the range of value went uncaptured.

How Primes Can Capture the Most Value from Specialist Firms

Bring in specialized disciplines in the RFQ stage. Before design decisions have been made, and the scope of the specialist’s contribution has been defined by the assumptions of someone who is not the expert that knows how to deliver on world-class claims. Before the owner’s evaluation priorities have been translated into fixed technical requirements without necessary input from the specialist. This timing determines whether the expert partner has the runway to shape decisions or is stuck responding to ideas that are fundamentally insufficient to meet project goals.

Once the owner invites the specialist partners to the table, give those firms real access. A specialized firm that is excluded from owner conversations and key project meetings cannot contribute what it knows. So the owner never reaps the benefits of the expertise they are paying for. Define scope early enough to leverage the specialist’s input to close information gaps before they become design errors.

Getting the Prime and the Subconsultant on the Same Page

A tension exists in every pre-award teaming conversation around the legitimate concern that looping a specialized firm into pursuit discussions before any contract exists risks extracting that firm’s expertise without compensating the firm. This concern is reasonable.

However, early-stage strategic conversations to put the specialist firm and the owner on the same page is not the same as full project delivery. And treating those two things as equivalent conflates them in a way that fails to serve either party. A well-structured pre-contract engagement, with defined scope and mutual clarity about what is being contributed and why, protects both sides. The alternative, keeping the specialist at arm’s length until after award, has well-documented costs. And those costs fall squarely on the Prime.

The Future of Collaborative Infrastructure Projects

The most competitive teams responding to the next generation of public infrastructure are coordinating large teams of specialists. We are seeing as many as six or more firms across disciplines. With each of those disciplines contributing specialized expertise the Prime does not carry in-house and cannot replicate with the same quality or cost. Increasingly, specialist areas like customer experience, wayfinding, and sustainability are what owners score. Because they are what customers need and respond to. In profound ways, the specialist disciplines are making the difference between a project that functions as it is promised (and funded) to function and one that does not.

Now, the question for primes contractors is when to bring in specialist sub-contractors. Recent data and our own experience show earlier is better. It is measurably cheaper, more productive, and more likely to produce a deliverable that brings better ROI for the owner over the next thirty years and beyond.