Communication Commercial jobs — even those that most closely resemble residential work in their scale and materials use — are renowned for their complexity regarding building code and safety compliance, tighter scheduling, and dispute resolution.
The best commercial builders employ practices that both require and encourage regular and productive communication among all involved parties to achieve success. “It’s not enough to simply fulfill the conditions of the contract,” says Jeffery Campbell, Ph.D., who chairs the facilities management program at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and culled a commercial building “best practices” manual for NAHB. “You have to manage the human side of the project.”
For instance, Campbell encourages the practice of conducting a meeting or a survey of the key project players, including the owner, prior to the start of construction to reach a consensus about the administration and procedures that will be followed to deliver the job within the terms of the contract. “It clarifies expectations and goes beyond the written construction documents,” he says.
Such a forum is separate from (and prior to) a typical pre-construction meeting, which focuses on logistics and value-engineering more so than communication and change-order processes, Campbell says, resulting in better client relations and retention.
The latter meeting, a staple among commercial builders and increasingly popular on the residential side, is a critical step to staying on schedule. Although commercial jobs can stretch out for months given their higher level of complexity and larger scale than a single-house project, the deadline is usually inflexible, based on an owner opening for business on a certain date to meet his numbers and satisfy his lenders, for example, or on classrooms being ready for the fall semester.
To keep everyone in line, commercial builders launch project-specific Web sites to not only solicit bids and post plans and specs, but to also remain live throughout the job as a resource and reference. Through the project Web site, anyone on the team with password permission can confirm and update the schedule, track change orders, manage disputes and claims, review requests for information, and check for lien releases, among other functions reliant on effective communication.
Toward the end of the job, especially one with an extended schedule, commercial contractors have taken to reconvening the team to rekindle their enthusiasm and close out the project on time. Near the completion of a $49 million expansion of Atlanta’s Georgia World Congress Center, for instance, the general contractor held a half-day session with representatives of each project partner to expose obstacles to completing the job on schedule and to set action plans to overcome them. As a result, the team transformed an anticipated six-week delay — and significant penalties — to an on-time delivery.
Perhaps nowhere is effective communication more critical than the process of managing change orders. A perennial thorn in the side of remodelers, it is one area where the most successful commercial contractors are at their best. “If residential contractors would apply the same best practices to their change-order process instead of relying on a handshake or a conversation, they wouldn’t have any problems,” Shiner says.
Specifically, those practices include a paper trail of requests, estimates, and client confirmation or approval of any changes to the contract that can be used to deflect disputes, force payments, or avoid delay penalties upon completion. “The key is to be prompt about pricing the change and communicating any anticipated delays it will cause,” Ross says. “Don’t wait until the end of the job to submit them for payment.”
Other risk-management practices include automatically sending and collecting lien waivers for any subcontract over $500 (perhaps lower for a remodeling job) and submitting the releases as part of a payment application package to the client to trigger a draw based on work performed to date — one of Nugent’s policies.
Another one: Nugent conducts at least three mandated, in-office training sessions a year regarding its jobsite safety plan and procedures. The company supplements these meetings with more frequent toolbox talks. Like many practices born from contractual or regulatory mandates (think OSHA), safety and a dedication to risk management are practices that any contractor can apply. “Just because you don’t have to, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t,” Shiner says.
On the surface, commercial work and residential remodeling look like apples and elephants. But when it comes to strategic planning, professionalism, and communication, there are significant cross-over practices. “Most of us in the construction business know these things,” Ross says. “We get into trouble when we start to deviate from the plan.” —Rich Binsacca is a freelance writer in Boise, Idaho.