When you hire a construction consultant, you are hiring a professional who is an expert in construction and the project process. A construction consultant is there to help you through any problems and decisions that pop up along the way.
Why Should You Hire a Construction Consultant for Your Project?
With any construction project, there are a lot of moving parts and a lot to think about.
If you’ve started a construction project, you may come to a point in the process where your knowledge and experience just aren't enough to go forward efficiently.
Now it's time to get some help.
If this is your first time managing a construction project or if you’re still new to it, the project and process may be overwhelming, which is understandable.
A good construction consultant will want to define a project’s beginning, identify current construction bottlenecks, and monitor the active construction rollout program, and much more.
As regards specific services, then construction consultants may do any of the following to help your project:
Schedule Creation
Schedule Reviewing and Analysis
Budget and cost estimating
Contract administration
Cost and change order management
Risk control and management
Root cause analysis
A construction consultant is there to help your project run more smoothly.
They could help you avoid or lessen the number of mistakes that may be extremely costly.
It’s ideal to hire a construction consultant early in the planning stage of the project. The consultant should help you create a construction plan that works within your budget and manpower. To help quality control, the consultant should point out problems and offer solutions.
Through risk control and management, you should create a plan that assures safety for everyone working on the project. A consultant should have a lot of experience with risk management and know what you need to have in place and what you need to do to decrease safety risks.
Construction consultants are there to support you and help you with negotiations and problems with other contractors, clients, and vendors. They should give you support throughout the entire project and help you manage every little detail.
The consultants should see the project through with you.
Consultants also help save money by a number of different methods, from them are:
Negotiating costs with vendors,
Helping to stick to your budget and timelines,
Let contractors know exactly what supplies/subcontractors are needed for the project and when.
Do you need a Construction Consultant for Your Project?
The short answer is yes, if you can afford one.
That said, there are some things you may want to do before hiring a construction consultant, to make sure that you keep billings low and help yourself in the process.
How Can I Make the Most of a Construction Consultant (or benefit if you can't afford one!)
Today there is a long list of tasks which in the past could only be done by a trained professional - which have now been outsourced to different technologies instead!
So to benefit yourself and your business as much as possible you should look to automate as much as you can before you look to hire outside help (as this is commonly much, much more expensive!)
From the technologies you will want to make sure that you are utilizing are the following:
A universal project management software
By making sure that every member of the construction team (yours, contractors, subcontractors etc) are using the same software, you look to save loads of consultants (or your time) from having to take schedules and updates and manually work them together.
Simply ensure that you are all on the same cloud-based software, and look to have real-time updates across the whole project at your fingertips.
This is also very useful in the next point, which is to:
Use task-specific plugins.
This is software which has been built to build upon the project management software.
What this means is say that you use Primavera P6 for your project planning and managing, you will want to see what task-specific software is available to automate certain consultants tasks BEFORE you look to delegate (i.e. hire outside help).
There are many of these now, each designed to help in a specific area.
We offer our two plug-in technologies, Claim and Schedule Cracker to help with Schedule Submittal Review and deep analysis specifically.
By using this software you may benefit from consultant like results even if you can't afford them.
To check out the tasks which we created these two to automate, Click Here!
So what should I do?
Really, if you are getting involved in a construction project of any decent size you should hire a construction consultant to help.
There is so much knowledge needed to effectively run a construction project and avoid the different pitfalls - or the traps that people knowingly set! (Phoney claims, overcharging, bad work, etc)
As you can see, there may be a lot of benefits to hiring a construction consultant.
That said, save yourself billing by getting your software use up to date, a good cloud-based project planning/management software and plugins to automate some of the work for the consultants (at maybe less than 10% of the price!)
Thanks a lot for reading and take care,
Niall
The Project Cracker Team