The Hidden Cost of Silos: How Communication Gaps Derail Protective Building Projects
If you have been on a protective building project, you’ve seen this play out before. The project kicks off with the right intentions, the right people, and what appears to be a solid plan. Then, somewhere between the hazard analysis and project execution, the safety standard established at the beginning of the project slowly drifts. These misalignments result from a lack of information, assumptions made for time’s sake, expectations formed by miscommunication, and conversations that happened in one room but never reached the next.
By the time the fixes for the miscommunication surface to the owner as a protective building change order, the blast-resistant building on paper and the one being built have become two different things.
Most owner procurement teams treat that change order as the problem, when in reality, it’s the outcome of weeks or months of miscommunication — starting with the multi-disciplinary teams on their side. In protective building projects, the cost of letting critical information remain trapped in silos for too long is even higher than most project managers and procurement teams realize. And the most frustrating part? It was entirely avoidable.
The Telephone Game at Industrial Scale
There’s a reason the telephone game is funny in grade school. A phrase that starts as “purple elephants dance at midnight” becoming “her purple pants cost a lot” is harmless. In an LNG project or an ammonia plant construction project, the stakes look a little different.
Protective buildings involve a long chain of stakeholders: owners, process safety teams, EPCs, structural engineers, fabricators, installers, and commissioning teams. Every handoff is an opportunity for information to lose fidelity. A performance requirement noted in a hazard analysis gets summarized in the EPC scope. The EPC scope gets interpreted by the design team. The drawings get estimated by a contractor who’s never seen the original siting study or understands what the hazards require in design.
No one sets out to compromise the outcome, but by the time the building is delivered, it may match the drawings and still fall short of the operational and safety expectations it was meant to protect.
As FORTRESS and BakerRisk explored in a recent webinar, most protective building failures are communication failures, not engineering failures. It’s a pattern that shows up in post-mortem reviews, cost reconciliations, and field rework reports across the industry.
What Communication Breakdown Actually Costs
A joint study by PlanGrid and FMI surveyed 600 construction leaders and found that nearly half of all industrial construction rework in the U.S., costing $31.3 billion annually, is directly tied to poor communication and inadequate project data. The Construction Industry Institute puts it another way: Up to 30% of construction rework is attributable to communication failures.
Blast-resistant building delays and change orders tell a similar story. Research published in 2025 analyzing large-scale construction projects found that design changes account for 56.5% of cost overruns and 40% of project delays, while planning errors drive another 34.5% of overruns and 23.1% of delays. A KPMG study puts the macro picture plainly: Up to 80% of construction projects experience cost overruns, with change orders as a leading cause — typically accounting for 7 to 15% of total project costs.
For a $10 million protective building program, that’s $700,000 to $1.5 million in change order exposure. Before a single field condition has been encountered. Before a supply chain disruption. Before a schedule slip. That’s the floor, not the ceiling, of what misaligned communication costs.
And none of that accounts for the time. Late-stage scope changes drive out-of-sequence work, additional field changes, inflated labor hours, and procurement delays that cascade through the rest of the project schedule. In an LNG project where every day of downtime has a price tag, or an ammonia plant construction project with fixed startup commitments, schedule overruns can compound dramatically.
Where the Silos Form
Industrial construction projects are structurally prone to silo formation. Each project requires simultaneous participation from internal owner staff, process safety teams, EPCs, specialty engineers, fabricators, and installers — groups that often operate with their own processes and systems, in isolation from one another. Without deliberate intervention, these groups default to working in parallel rather than in alignment.
Silos between teams make it structurally easy for the right information to stay in the wrong room. In protective building projects, the blast-loading criteria, fire exposure, siting assumptions, and performance targets that can’t be compromised must be clearly communicated from the hazard analysis all the way to the installation crew. When one link in that chain doesn’t hold, the result is rework, schedule extensions, compliance risks, and, in the worst case, a building that doesn’t perform when it matters.
The Hidden Cost of Silos
The deeper problem starts even earlier. Too many projects never fully define what the building actually needs to be before design begins.
A conversation about hazard scenarios, siting conditions, occupancy assumptions, and performance requirements should happen at project scoping, before the rest of the project starts hardening around the wrong assumptions. The same conversation at 60% Design Drawings may require a Change Order or Schedule delay for drawing revisions. During fabrication, it could be a CO and Schedule delay for drawing revisions and fabrication rework.
Reactive risk management, out-of-sequence activities, and poor demand planning are some of the most frequent drivers of overruns, all downstream symptoms of the same upstream problem: The right conversation didn’t happen at the right time.
Every stage of a project where the right conversation is deferred is a stage where the cost of that conversation increases.
What Getting It Right Looks Like
The fix is earlier alignment between the right people on the right questions before the drawings exist. This conversation begins with project scoping, with process safety, structural engineering, and construction execution considered simultaneously.
With one single source of performance truth that travels with the project from hazard analysis to commissioning, not a version that gets paraphrased at each handoff and arrives at fabrication missing half its context, every team is working from the same set of expectations. This ensures blast criteria, siting conditions, and performance targets function as load-bearing documentation — treated with the same rigor as the structural drawings they inform.
The result is a project in which the building under construction remains aligned with the beginning, from the first scoping conversation to the final installation.
FORTRESS: Built to Close the Gap
The FORTRESS project management process was designed around the principle that protective building performance begins before the first drawing. Our first step in providing you with a protective building is to confirm that you are requesting the building you actually need, based on your current hazard profile and future facility operations plans. Our structural engineering team is second to none in the design of protective structures, and our subcontractors are trained to understand why every detail matters.
Our pre-engineered, modular reinforced concrete systems bring structural clarity to a space where ambiguity is expensive, arriving with defined performance criteria, tested for hazard resistance, and a delivery process built to stay aligned with project intent from scoping through commissioning.
If you’re a project manager or procurement lead managing a program that includes protective buildings, the most valuable conversation you can have isn’t about the delivery timeline. It’s about what the building needs to do, who knows it, and whether that knowledge will travel cleanly to every team that touches it.