After 30 years implementing construction software, Emanuel Falaguerra has watched 55–75% of projects miss their objectives. The reason isn't the software. It's what's happening before the software.

Construction has more tools than ever and somehow still runs on chaos. In this episode of Finance at the Jobsite, Rishi Srivastava sits down with Emanuel Falaguerra — a 20+ year veteran of construction technology — to unpack why so much of the industry's software spend never lands.

Emanuel makes a case that almost nobody in construction wants to hear: most software failures aren't software failures. They're process failures, dressed up as a vendor problem. Companies skip the hard work of defining how they actually operate, then expect a feature list to fix it. The result is a 55–75% implementation failure rate that hasn't moved in three decades.

The conversation digs into the part of the back office that exposes every one of those gaps — the WIP report. Emanuel calls WIP "an alignment problem, not a math problem," and walks through what a high-functioning WIP process actually looks like: clear ownership, a predictable close cadence, consistent reviewers, and the discipline to focus on the 20–80% window of a job where you can still influence the outcome.

Rishi and Emanuel also get into:

— Why private-equity-owned construction software vendors stop innovating— The "innocent" way silos start (a PM buying a toolbox-talk app)— Why PMs and accountants live with two different "truths"— What CFOs actually pay for a failed implementation (it isn't license fees)— Why AI is going to amplify whatever process you have — for better or worse— Emanuel's new WIP product, launching next month

If you've ever sat in a WIP meeting wondering why the numbers don't tie, this one's for you.

Emanuel Falaguerra has spent 30+ years implementing construction accounting and ERP systems, with the last decade focused almost exclusively on WIP. He's currently building a software product designed to fix the WIP gap by enforcing process discipline rather than adding more features.

Rishi Srivastava is the host of Finance at the Jobsite and founder of Beiing Human, an AI platform for construction finance teams. Before construction, he was an AI engineer at Bank of America.