What is Construction Management?
To understand how to manage something we must first identify what it is. The four main tenants of construction management are time, budget, quality and safety. Additional items that are also a central responsibility of Project Management Services are regulatory compliance, supply chain management and reporting.
This article focuses on the management of construction time; in later posts I will discuss the other essential elements.
To manage the timely construction of any project you must ensure that all items are properly planned for, including materials, future labour requirements, regulatory and compliance requirements and construction difficulties identified and mitigated, amongst many other things. I am going to concentrate on measures of timely performance, and discuss their positives and negatives.
Construction Time Measurement Strategies
There are many methods of measuring construction performance, and they vary significantly in approach and emphasis:
Stage Timeframe
Reporting periodically (usually monthly) on duration taken from the start of a stage of construction to the end of the stage (e.g. frame, brickwork, fit out, etc.). These are averaged for each stage across all jobs where that construction stage has been completed, in that period.
This allows comparison across multiple supervisors, but is very simplistic as it assumes all contracts should take the same duration in the same stage. It is also prone to significant ups and downs due to the low number of contracts stage completions within a period (anything below seven stage completions makes the statistical average dubious). The other downside to this is that at a monthly average you don't get the opportunity to resolve problems, you only report on them. It is a good reporting strategy for quarterly, half yearly and yearly supervisor performance charts, and to see the overall average movements across all the supervisors.
Progress Markers
This is about placing a theoretical weight against specific milestone tasks in the contracts construction program, and therefore, recording the completion of these tasks during a time-frame, rewards the supervisor of the job. This can be reported per contract, per supervisor or per construction manager.
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