Guaranteed Maximum Price. The name implies a ceiling. A promise. You know what you are getting into.

Except you do not. And the industry’s track record makes this plain.

More than 70 percent of capital projects exceed budget. Thirty percent miss their schedule. These are not outliers. They are the expected baseline. An industry that has normalized failure while using words like “guaranteed.”

The productivity paradox the industry has yet to confront

Construction is the only major industry in the world that has gotten less productive over the past four decades. Not stagnant. Less productive.

Manufacturing doubled its productivity in that same period. Information services tripled. Meanwhile, construction (despite CAD, BIM, project management platforms, drones, and now AI) has gone backward.

The conventional explanation is that construction is resistant to change. That is not wrong, but it is not the complete answer.

The more fundamental explanation: every construction project is a temporary enterprise. It forms, executes, and dissolves. The team that built the knowledge (the hard-won lessons about this site, this owner, these coordination problems) scatters to the next job. Nothing persists. The next project starts from scratch.

You can digitize a temporary enterprise. You cannot transform it the way you transform a factory or a software company. The knowledge destruction is structural.

The information problem you are paying for

Research drawing on interviews with over 100 owners, designers, builders, and manufacturers reveals a consistent finding across every stakeholder group: the root cause of cost overruns is not technical. It is informational.

One builder described it plainly: “About 40 percent of capital dollars on a project are non-value-add. Wasted on inefficiencies in the supply chain.” Stated differently: for every dollar you spend on construction, forty cents produces no building, no value, only friction, rework, coordination failures, and miscommunication.

That is not a line item. That is your project.

The waste is not distributed evenly either. It concentrates at the seams: the handoffs between owner and designer, designer and contractor, contractor and subcontractor, project and operations. Every time information crosses an organizational boundary, some of it falls on the floor. Someone re-creates it. Usually incorrectly.

What owners do not know they do not know

The dimension that compounds this most acutely: many owners have never experienced a project that worked differently, which makes it difficult to know what to demand.

Research consistently finds that many owners cannot read plans, cannot reconcile design intent with constructability, and do not know what questions to raise at each phase. So they rely on the people who are supposed to serve them, the same people whose financial interests do not fully align with theirs.

This is not a failure of individual owners. It is a structural condition. Most owners build infrequently. The people on the other side of the table build constantly. The information asymmetry is substantial, and the industry has never faced strong incentives to close it.

What “guaranteed” should actually look like

Real cost certainty does not come from a contract clause. It comes from a system where problems surface early enough to act on them, before the concrete is poured, before the equipment is ordered, before cascading delays compound into something that costs months and seven figures.

It comes from owners having the same picture of project reality that their contractors and designers have. Not a filtered weekly report. Not a summary of what the project team decided you needed to know. The actual data, in real time, tied to decisions you can make.

The GMP is a legal instrument. Transparency is what makes it worth something.

You built the right contract. Now ask whether you have the right information system behind it.