Collaborative Project Management Considerations

By Sheldone Needle

More and more contractors are involved with construction project management as part of what they do. Some will be heavily involved in pre-construction doing design or engineering work or helping oversee these functions. They may also be soliciting and comparing bids from prospective subcontractors.

Once construction actually begins, they will monitor progress on the schedule and costs to date versus expected costs at completion based on the percentage of work that has been done. This may result in over or under billing the job to date which, of course, can have a major impact on working capital. If government work is involved they will have to keep tabs on “earned value” which is measured by comparing costs to date to the total contract amount to assure that they are not going to release funds that have not been “earned” by the contractor based on actual progress.

In addition to tracking actual costs to estimates by time, phase and cost type, phase, construction managers have to deal with documents such as change orders to the job, RFIs and submittals which must be routed for approval. Ideally software should allow for a specific work-flow process that routes documents from one individual to another via email alerts or reports. Furthermore, the software will need to keep track of meeting minutes and comments from various stakeholders in the process as subcontractors, the GC, etc.

Collaborative project management involves more parties and is more complex. In this case, an owner may commission one or more construction projects and contracts with general contractors to deal with hiring subcontractors and taking full responsibility for actual construction. Since owners are funding the project they are very concerned about things like job progress and tracking costs to date. They also want to provide a platform for end to end project management where various stakeholders such as with design engineers, architects, mechanical contractors, etc. will use one software solution that supports entering labor and materials cost data, along with relevant documentation, on a real time basis and tracking these costs to budget. A construction software application that includes document vaulting is also desirable to allow scanning and storing documents associated with specific transactions with some kind of indexed subject lookup. This goes toward the paperless office concept that many people want.

An intelligent work-flow process will be needed in these situations such as tracking how many change order dollars were approved for a contract as well as how many are pending along with how many punch list items are unresolved to date and those responsible for it.

The owner will want to allow specific access rights to stakeholders based on their roles but not allow them to see data that is outside their area of responsibility. In this case the software has to support very sophisticated security configurations for various users.

Well designed construction project management software will continue to serve owners for capital projects, maintenance and preventative maintenance well beyond the initial construction. Sometimes owners want to monitor multiple projects at multiple facilities (e.g. universities or multi-location retailers) and track post construction costs like maintenance or simple renovation costs.

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