1. Who This Is For

The GV methodology is a feasibility-stage tool. Its relevance differs by role:

• Developers — test more site and design configurations against a budget before committing to land or design fees.
• Financiers and investors — review the assumptions behind a budget directly, rather than relying on a single headline figure from a third party.
• Quantity surveyors and cost consultants — get a structured, resource-based starting point for early cost plans, with a traceable basis for every line.
• Architects and design teams — see the cost and programme consequence of a design decision — floor count, structural system, grid — before it is documented in detail.
• Project managers — get a programme that is derived from the same quantities as the cost plan, rather than a separate estimate to reconcile.

2. The Problem: Early Decisions, High Risk

The financial risk in a construction project is heaviest at the point where the least is known about it. At concept and feasibility stage, decisions about site acquisition, funding, and design direction are frequently made against a budget figure that has been produced quickly, from limited data, using one or more of the following:

• Historical rates per square metre, applied to a proposed gross floor area
• Elemental benchmarking against comparable completed projects
• A manually built spreadsheet cost plan, updated by hand as the brief evolves
• A programme estimate produced separately from the cost estimate, with limited cross-checking between the two

Each of these approaches is a reasonable starting point, and experienced estimators can produce credible numbers this way. The difficulty is what happens next: as the design develops — floor count changes, the structural grid is revised, a basement is added — the original estimate has to be reworked, often from close to scratch, because the underlying spreadsheet was not built to respond to a change in a single input. The cost of re-estimating discourages testing alternatives, which means fewer options get properly costed before a design direction is locked in.

A second, related problem is transparency. A single headline budget figure, however carefully produced, is difficult for a client or financier to interrogate. If quantities, rates, and allowances are not individually visible, the number reads as an assertion rather than a calculation — and disagreements about it tend to become disagreements about credibility rather than about specific, checkable assumptions.