This article will provide you a fast overview of the top five reasons why you should hire a professional construction manager to manage your project. Few people have the experience or time to handle a high-value, complex construction project (residential or commercial), and even fewer should take on the hazards. Costly mistakes abound in an industry where time is money. The value of a skilled construction manager is a positive cost-benefit ratio when compared to the dangers of doing a significant project without professional assistance.
Consider this: how much is it worth to you to avoid a lengthy delay or a total redesign? A good construction manager will expertly oversee the project to maximize efficiencies, minimize problems, and keep your project on track to completion.
1. Expert and Objective Representation
The job of a construction project manager is to provide objective project management and technical competence in order to represent the owner’s and project’s best interests. As the owner’s representative, the construction manager will oversee the entire project from start to finish, including feasibility, entitlement, preconstruction, design coordination, budget, schedule, quality and function, risk management, and project team retention and coordination.
Professional construction managers oversee the planning, design, and construction of a project from start to finish using specialized project management skills. They understand building methods and technologies, can interpret contracts and technical drawings, and have the experience needed to create the best project plan. Construction managers issue and coordinate the required team member bidding, advise the owner on the most appropriate project team, and supervise them to produce their best work. Engineering, architecture, contractors, and specialty consultants are all coordinated by them. They coordinate essential disciplines, typically can spot problems in advance, mitigate change orders, and maintain quality as the owner’s project liaison.
2. Lower Total Project Costs
When a detailed scope of work is developed and the overall project budget is determined during the early planning and preconstruction phases, the majority of savings opportunities are recognized. Your construction manager should be brought on board early to help with project budgeting, cost estimating, and valuable advice on the design and project plan.
They’ll make suggestions for improvements and provide critical input on scope decisions and their financial implications, which must all be considered and evaluated against the timeline. Because there will be fewer change orders and budget increases as a result of this approach to budget and schedule, the change order process will be improved later in construction. The construction manager will continue to improve and update budget and schedule estimations throughout the project’s life cycle in order to maintain constant and rigorous cost control of the process and avoid costly surprises.
3. Project Management
The owner, construction manager, and architect should all be on the project team to offer a “checks and balances” structure that allows key design decisions to be made based on cost, schedule, and quality considerations as well as aesthetics and function. Owners are frequently asked to make decisions without considering other factors that may create delays or cost more than the contractor planned. In our view, in order to make an informed decision, the owner should be given complete information on the consequences of a design issue or change.
Control the timetable.
Construction scheduling strategies, as well as the construction manager’s involvement on the timetable, should start early in the design process and continue throughout the project. As project managers, it is their responsibility to urge all members of the team, including the contractor, architects, engineers, and consultants, to participate in the formulation of the overall project schedule so that problems can be identified early and change orders can be avoided. By expediting the design and construction timeline, a smart construction manager can save money.
Change Order Controls and Construction Bidding Procedures.
To avoid gaps, overlaps, or ambiguities that could later generate possibilities for change orders by the contractor, an experienced construction manager must establish bid packages for all of the various scopes of services during the design process. To avoid mid-project overruns, your construction manager should review, analyse, and negotiate change orders on behalf of the owner during construction. Your construction manager will strategize the best method to complete the most amount of work possible within budget and save on contracted expenses by handling the bidding and change order processes.
Quality Assurance.
Early in the construction program, a construction manager should create quality controls through project and performance standards. This begins with the establishment of quality standards that are acceptable to both the client and the design team during the preconstruction phase. The contract agreements should specify all quality criteria and a quality control inspection procedure for the actual building phase after they have been set. Correcting faulty work is costly and avoidable. You should not put your trust in the building inspector to safeguard your interests.
Your construction manager’s team will include highly qualified, multi-disciplinary personnel who will ensure that the design team, engineers, and other professionals physically inspect the work to ensure that it is in accordance with the contract documents, is of the highest quality, and is exactly what you paid for.
4. Management of Risk
Risk management is a part of construction management. Construction is rife with risk, which is defined as anything that can go wrong. To protect the owner from responsibility, a construction risk management plan should identify, analyze, and minimize risks. Financial risks from cost overruns, uncontrolled change orders, or volatile market pricing; unforeseen site conditions such as hazardous materials; the possibility of construction defects, accidents, or mistakes; unrealistic expectations; and contract and insurance disputes are all examples of risk exposures. Risk allocation to entities other than the owner is a part of a construction manager’s risk management approach. The construction manager mitigates risks by closely monitoring the work being done during construction.
5. Have a good time
Manage your own project if you’re in the construction company. If not, get a professional construction manager to help you with the project. As a consequence, you’ll have a more favorable building experience with less stress and disruption to your regular routine. Employ a professional construction manager, collaborate with them, but leave them to perform their job and accept their recommendations. When interviewing a construction manager, it’s crucial to know what questions to ask.
Final Thought
Through superior planning, cost and schedule saving, value engineering, and reduced risk while balancing the competing goals of a project, a skilled construction manager offers an overall superior project and generally saves owners more than their own costs.
Let your construction manager hire and manage the best team to create you the greatest project. Their knowledge and dedication to managing the project in the best interests of the owner yields benefits on every level, from contract and insurance risk management to improved quality, budget, and schedule controls. Above all, a skilled professional construction manager will build partnerships among the team and the owner as they work toward a single goal: a building program that is completed on time and on budget while meeting the project’s goals and objectives.