Cost and commercial management

Maximise your return on investment.

Gaining greater value from your projects and programmes than you spend, over their lifetime, is fundamental. 

Yet many struggle to achieve their desired return on investment, in the face of myriad challenges – such as market constraints, project complexity, resource scarcity and wage inflation.

Moreover, projects can sometimes be poorly matched with their objectives – or poorly executed even if well aligned and designed.

Working with an experienced cost, commercial and quality manager can help you spot and manage the risks, making positive returns much more certain.

What can we do for you?

We work with you across the project lifecycle, finding and adding value at every stage. Cost and commercial management has been core to our business since the 1860s, and we have guided successful outcomes for many of the world’s most challenging projects. 

Project shaping

The greatest opportunity to improve whole-life project performance is in the early optioneering and shaping stages. We integrate our practice with our wider capabilities, like economic policy and regulation, investment and business case development, procurement and supply chain management, risk and planning, and strategic asset management. 

In addition to the costs of materials, construction methodologies, project logistics, labour and energy, we account for your environmental, societal and climate needs too, like embodied and operational carbon emissions, climate resilience, social value and biodiversity net gain.

Digital delivery

We take a digital first approach to project delivery, using common data environments to achieve collaboration and enable the flow of information. That achieves faster and better understanding of how decisions impact commercial performance, as well as supporting proactive decision making and minimising the risk of duplicated effort. 

Our experts work with design teams to link asset models with data on prices, carbon factors and more, so that the impacts of design decisions are immediately clear. 

We use dashboards for reporting and analytics, giving you and your delivery partners visibility of issue and risk management, programming and scheduling, cost forecasting and cash flow, change control and procurement management.

Social outcomes

Our experts in social outcomes and stakeholder engagement work alongside our cost, commercial and quality team. Their skills can help you to identify and realise opportunities to add value for your customers, communities and society that sometimes save money and are often cost-neutral or will pay back investment. 

Whole-life performance

We help you to identify and minimise design features that could expose them to potential future costs. We also help to shape projects for adaptability so that they can respond to possible changes in demand, use, regulation or input costs.

Services we provide

Maximising value through cost and commercial management

Our award-winning quantity surveyors, cost management consultants and cost engineers work across all economic sectors. Their skills span cost forecasting, negotiation and account closure services, working with asset owners and end users, property developers and financiers, and for public and private clients. 

Our experience

  • Delivery partner for 10 Dock Programme and major infrastructure projects, Devonport, UK
    We’re part of a collaborative, integrated team leading major improvements to the docks and facilities at Devonport, which are needed to maintain the Royal Navy’s ships and submarines. Our role involves commercial management, to achieve a predictable outturn cost that delivers best value to the UK government and taxpayers.
  • RAF Lakenheath F-35 subprogramme of US Visiting Forces infrastructure programme, UK
    As part of a wider delivery partner role, we provided commercial management across 15 projects making up the F-35 subprogramme. We focused on design challenges, with our subject matter experts providing over-the-shoulder reviews during design development to confirm compliance to relevant UK and US standards. This provided confidence for our stakeholder design reviewers against delivery of customer requirements.
  • University Hospital of Wales, UK
    We provided cost management to Cardiff & Vale NHS Trust under a measured term contract to support refurbishment and rehabilitation works across its property portfolio, which covers much of Cardiff and the surrounding area. Our services enabled fast track procurement of three contractors, each of which provided significant discounts at tender stage due to the way the financial arrangements were prepared.

Carbon Portal

Identify, calculate, and reduce embodied and operational carbon emissions. This infrastructure carbon calculator is aligned to PAS 2080, the international specification for managing carbon across the built environment (co-authored by Mott MacDonald). It allows anyone across your business and supply chain to identify and calculate carbon emissions, not just carbon experts.

An overhead view of a bike lane, train tracks and a stretch of highway with a single vehicle.