Member Article

Project Management Guide, Part 1

From assessing risk to organizing documentation and ensuring that projects stay on strackchedule, project managers have a vast amount of responsibility and are crucial to the overall success of a project. Learn how to better evaluate costs, time, communication, quality, and safety on the job site.

Understand an Estimate’s Influence on Project Planning Success

Estimating project cost plays one of the most significant roles in the project management process. It informs the structure of the schedule, influences the processes used during construction, and determines the resources used.

Successful project managers maintain big picture thinking as they plan and anticipate aspects within the estimate that could potentially derail the schedule and budget. Identifying these issues in advance allows project managers to prepare for potential delays.

Ideally, estimators would have all the time they need to consider the tasks and processes involved in a project. This is unrealistic however, and project managers have to assume the estimate they’re working with is flawed. They must do the necessary work to locate those flaws and prepare a schedule that reflects the realities of a project, both from a cost and time perspective.

Assessing Risk

There are an infinite amount of risks involved in construction and it is the project manager’s job to not only be aware but also be prepared for them. It is best to know any and all potential risks as soon as possible so their team can prepare for all types of risks and not just ones from a particular division.

Project managers must evaluate each risk’s significance as related to project objectives such as cost, time, quality, and safety in order to create a ranking order of those risks relative to each category.

Risks arise from the sheer volume of information and participants involved in projects. Contractors are challenged by the number of entities involved, which can lead to gaps in communication if incorrectly managed. The best results come when contractors focus on employing skilled planners and managers and implement flexible and comprehensive project management tools.

Planning for Quality

The issue of quality enters a project at every stage, but it’s during the planning stages that the tone is set, ensuring a quality project will actually be built. The core principle of organizing for quality is communication.

Cloud-based project management software such as Procore offers one of the best solutions to guaranteeing outstanding communication and quality. All team members are given access to create, update and distribute project documentation including data such as contracts, RFIs, submittals, drawings, and photos.

Project managers can minimize material quality issues by ensuring components are installed and built correctly and by verifying that materials and fixtures used for construction are good quality. A global marketplace feeds today’s building environment, thus making it impossible to guarantee that all products have the highest quality.

With quality materials and workmanship and an aggressive effort to monitor the entire project, projects can be successfully completed at a high quality, even in today’s fast-paced building environment. For a successful project manager, the key lies in thorough planning.

Successfully Managing Information

The amount of necessary information and documentation in a construction project is enormous, often making project management difficult to organize and maintain. Maged Abdelsayed of Tardif, Murray & Assoc., consultants based in Quebec, Canada, estimates a $10 million project generates 56,000 pages of documentation!

This data includes everything from contracts to RFIs, drawings, and submittals. As the ease of creating and sharing data has increased, so too has the amount of data. While sharing and updating the most current information for all team members seems daunting, the instant access and availability to this documentation from any location also holds promise of new capabilities.

With an increase in the amount of data, establishing an information/data sharing system is crucial for efficient project management. Thankfully, construction software and cloud services like Procore can manage various amounts of documentation and file type diversity. Cloud offerings are indispensable in a construction project as any of these files can be accessed from anywhere, at any time.

Today’s construction projects are more information intensive than ever and the trend toward greater and greater amounts of data is only growing. Construction companies and project managers that wake to the realization of information as a commodity will find new and better ways to use it and discover previously unavailable revenue streams.

To learn more, download Procore’s free Construction Project Management Guide, Part 1, here, the first installment of a free eBook on project management best practices.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Procore .