Megaprojects are getting bigger, riskier, and more complex. From infrastructure and defence to energy and technology, organisations are investing billions in programmes that span years, involve hundreds of stakeholders, and operate under immense scrutiny.
And yet, despite improvements in tools, governance, and technical planning, the success rate of these programmes remains stubbornly low.
Why? Because one of the most critical drivers of success isn’t technical at all. It’s relational.
The risk no one is talking about
When we talk about project risk, we usually focus on familiar territory: budget overruns, supply chain disruption, regulatory changes, or delivery delays. But beneath those surface-level issues lies a more subtle - and often ignored - risk: the breakdown of B2B relationships between delivery partners.
Megaprojects rarely depend on a single contractor or team. Instead, they thrive or fail based on ecosystems of organisations working in tandem. These inter-organisational relationships influence everything from decision-making and escalation paths to how teams stay aligned around mission, budget, and delivery. Still, relationship health is seldom measured with the same rigour as scope, budget, or schedule - leaving a critical blind spot in programme performance.
Why relationships matter more than contracts
Many programmes assume that a well-written contract is enough to manage delivery risk. But contracts can only go so far. When things get difficult - and they always do, success depends on trust, alignment, and collaboration between organisations.
When relationships are weak, the project suffers. Communication becomes defensive or fragmented, as partners stop sharing openly and begin working in silos. Decision-making slows dramatically when alignment and confidence are lacking, and even simple requests get caught in drawn-out approval cycles. Instead of working together to solve emerging issues, organisations shift toward protecting their own interests, escalating problems rather than resolving them. In the absence of trust, blame culture takes hold, creating more resistance and less accountability across teams. The result? Margins shrink, threatening the financial and reputational stability of the programme. For example, the project to develop a new IT system for the Scottish Police Authority collapsed with no output due to “a damaging loss of trust between those involved and fundamental disagreements about what the programme needed to deliver”.
By contrast, when strategic relationships are strong, they act as multipliers for performance. Issue resolution becomes faster and more constructive because teams are aligned and willing to collaborate, not compete. These teams are also better able to adapt to change, making real-time adjustments without damaging momentum. Strong relationships promote innovation, as people feel psychologically safe to challenge, improve, and contribute across organisational boundaries. Most importantly, they foster higher trust and transparency, creating a delivery environment where risk is surfaced early, and performance can be predicted more reliably.
For instance, East West Rail 2, a case study identified by our research with UCL, developed a single alliance culture by partner companies employing members who shared a single identity. Also, rapid response teams and innovation workshops with participants from each partner were formed to solve issues and overcoming challenges. As one participant suggested “ there was nothing that the project team couldn't do. There was nothing the project team couldn't solve. There were no problems too big. Everything became manageable just on the strength of those relationships.”
The invisible red flags
So how do you know if your strategic relationships are strong enough?
Most leaders rely on gut feel. They assume that if no one is raising red flags, everything is fine. But this can be dangerously misleading. Relationship risks often surface after damage is done, not before, and the early warning signs are easy to overlook.
Misaligned expectations between partners can quietly derail collaboration. Teams may believe they’re working toward the same outcome, but differing assumptions about priorities, timelines, or delivery standards can create friction behind the scenes. Contracts often exacerbate the problem. Instead of enabling collaboration, they can entrench control and limit flexibility, especially if incentives are not aligned to shared success.
High turnover across delivery teams is another signal, as it disrupts continuity, erodes trust, and prevents strong interpersonal relationships from forming. Similarly, when ways of working are misaligned, such as disconnected systems or governance structures, coordination slows, and confusion increases.
Perhaps most critically, many projects suffer from an inability to raise or resolve issues early. Without safe, structured mechanisms to surface tension, problems are ignored until they escalate into formal disputes or delays. And in too many programmes, performance reviews focus on technical metrics, ignoring the relational dynamics that underpin real-world outcomes.
Even one of these red flags is enough to put your project at risk, often before anyone realises it.
Turning relationship into a strategic advantage
The good news is that relationship health isn’t intangible; it can be measured, understood, and improved, just like any other delivery metric.
Forward-thinking organisations are leading the way by introducing structured B2B relationship diagnostics that go beyond anecdotal feedback. These tools use perception data and behavioural analysis to pinpoint misalignment early and identify areas for targeted improvement. One organisation currently doing this is the STEP programme, which is building a Fusion Nuclear Reactor in the UK. They know that the relationships with their partners are critical to the success of the project, so they measure relationship performance along with their other programme metrics.
This means they can include relationship health into their project governance. This includes soft issues as key indicators of delivery health, on par with financial and schedule-based KPIs. To the surprise of many project leaders, factors such as trust, honesty and sharing of information can be measured and tracked in the same way as forecasts of cost and time. Instead of relying solely on transactional contracts, organisations are shifting toward outcome-focused agreements with joint success clauses and shared incentives, creating a stronger foundation for trust.
Investment in relational leadership is accelerating too. Project leaders and senior stakeholders are being equipped with skills to navigate tension, align diverse teams, and manage across organisational boundaries. These leaders understand that soft skills are, in fact, hard performance drivers.
Finally, aligning partner incentives around long-term success, rather than short-term protection, ensures everyone remains focused on shared outcomes. The result isn’t just reduced risk, it’s greater agility, margin, and confidence in delivery.
What organisations can do today
If you’re a programme leader or executive, there are practical steps you can take today to reduce hidden relationship risk and set your project up for success.
Start by assessing your current relationships. Use structured tools or perception-based surveys to uncover misalignment or tension that might otherwise go unspoken. Next, bring delivery partners together to redefine what success looks like, not only in terms of outputs, but also behaviours, collaboration, and shared ownership. Revisit your contracts to determine whether they support or undermine this alignment. If necessary, revise them to incentivise the outcomes you actually want.
Add relational risk to your risk register and manage it in the same way you do your other risks. Start by identifying your critical relationships: the ones that if they fail, they will seriously impact the outcome of your project. Then assess them and calculate the likelihood of failure. There are tools to do this and they can be used to assess all types of relationships in a project; with clients, suppliers, regulators, local authorities, pressure groups, etc. Once you know the impact and the probability of occurrence you can use conventional risk management techniques to track them and manage them.
Invest in relational leadership. Equip your teams with the tools and confidence to manage complexity through relationships, not just process. And finally, make relationship health part of your project controls. Regularly track progress using structured method, not just anecdotal feedback, so you can manage it proactively.
The future of delivery is relational
As delivery models evolve and ecosystems become the norm, the ability to manage relational risk will become a core differentiator. Projects that thrive will be those that treat relationships not as background noise, but as strategic infrastructure.
It’s time we stop treating relationships as soft, intangible elements of delivery, and start treating them as critical, measurable assets that determine whether major programmes succeed or fail.
Thank you, David Whitmore, for contributing to this article.
