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Capital Project Recovery Services for Distressed Portfolios

True capital project recovery services require more than a revised schedule – they require executive presence on the ground.

When major assets drift or face critical failure, I support the leadership team and provide the stabilisation that standard consultancies cannot.

From the fire impacted NZICC Project in Auckland to serving as the Chief Projects Officer at Diriyah Gate, Matthew Boot brings 30 years of frontline landmark construction project experience to stabilise, guide and support your complex construction projects and development portfolios.

Matthew Boot provided project recovery services on the NZICC Project in Auckland, New Zealand, following a devasting fire midway through construction
Following a major fire at the Barangaroo urban redevelopment in Sydney, Matthew Boot led the planning of the project recovery efforts.
With significant delays due to geotechnical conditions Matthew Boot was bought into to help provide governance and assurance on the project recovery efforts.

The Challenge of Distressed Projects

The major fire during the construction of Barangaroo required Matthew Boot to provide capital project recovery services as part of his role on the project
When providing capital project recovery services the roadmap for recovery is critical and importantly how it can be succinctly communicated. In this case a network diagram is used to show the critical work sequences that need to be executed.
Matthew Boot - capital project recovery expert

Projects Don’t Fail from a Lack of Planning

They fail from misalignment between executive intent and execution reality.

Projects struggle when the teams mistake scheduling for planning or worse, when disaster strikes.

When schedule slippage reaches the board level, organisations reach for familiar solutions – more dashboards, increasingly detailed schedules, bigger consultancies, better software. None of it works because none of it addresses what’s actually broken.

The symptoms are predictable: milestone dates drifting, contractor programmes that don’t align with reality, status reports that obscure more than they reveal, safety incidents start increasing, and a growing gap between what leadership believes and what the site team knows.

By the time executive management, financiers and key staekholders start asking hard questions, the window for conventional fixes has usually closed.

Capital Project Recovery Services – How I Help

I work with project owners, boards, and executive teams to stabilise delayed and distressed capital projects, develop project recovery strategies – and help build the internal capability that prevents future crises.

I utilise a five phase approach to support recovery efforts:

  • Phase I: Strategic Realignment – redefining “success”.
  • Phase II: Operational Triage – focussed on “stopping the bleeding”.
  • Phase III: Diagnostic Assessment – what is driving the “pace of construction”?
  • Phase IV: Recovery Roadmap – a new plan for the “current reality”.
  • Phase V: Execution Governance – effective governance and reporting focused on “actionable insights”

Why Clients Engage Me

The track record is specific. I’ve been embedded in stabilisation on major distressed projects – not observed them, I have worked with the teams on the frontline. NZICC. Barangaroo. Manchester Joint Hospital. NorthConnex. Diriyah Gate. These aren’t case studies borrowed from a firm’s portfolio. They’re projects where I was in the room making decisions.

The approach is practical. I don’t arrive with a methodology developed in a classroom. What’s Critical was built in the fire of actual project recoveries. It works because it’s been tested under pressure – seeking to understand the bottlenecks across the project’s multiple interfaces, supply chain challenges, resource constraints, productivity and logistics issues.

The goal is independence. I build your team’s capability rather than creating dependency on external consultants. The best engagement ends with your people owning the solution.

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Capital Project Recovery Services

Project Stabilisation

For projects that have gone off track – schedule blowouts, contractor disputes, stakeholder confidence collapsing – I provide hands-on strategic leadership to establish control and develop a credible path forward.

This isn’t a review that generates a report and disappears. I embed with your team, identify what’s actually broken versus what’s noise, and support the stabilisation effort until the project is back on defensible ground.

Typical engagements include:

  • Independent diagnostic and triage of distressed projects
  • Recovery planning and execution leadership
  • Board and stakeholder confidence restoration
  • Contractor performance intervention
  • Schedule reconstruction and validation
Kings Waterfront in Liverpool, UK. Significant delays during the early works required working with the team to provide capital project recovery services as part of Matthew Boot's global role at Lendlease

Capability Building

The best outcome isn’t a rescued project – it’s a team that doesn’t need rescuing again.

I work with project teams and organisations to install the systems, disciplines, and thinking that prevent projects from drifting into distress. This includes deploying the What’s Critical methodology—a practical framework forged from decades of front-line project recovery.

Capability building includes:

  • Transition from reactive reporting to predictive scheduling
  • What’s Critical methodology implementation
  • Project controls framework development
  • Team training, upskilling and mentoring
  • Governance, assurance and reporting system design