The construction manager is one of the central cogs of every construction project. You're busy from the time you arrive at work in the morning until you leave at the end of the day, often fighting fires and frantically calling subcontractors or the project manager to obtain or convey information. Not to mention the time spent trying to ensure that all problems are fully documented, that no one arrives on site in vain, and that material orders are not delayed, lost or, worse yet, damaged.
No two days are the same, but one thing is certain. You shouldn't have to continually reinvent the way you communicate with your project manager about site tours and things you see in the field.
How many times have you sent an important email or message to the office without receiving a response? And what effect did this lack of response have on the progress of your project?
It's no surprise, then, that many project managers feel constantly overwhelmed and stressed as they try to balance different dependencies, resolve constraints and, at the same time, align around milestones with both their project manager and those involved. subcontractors participating in the project. As a result, they often end up buried under a mountain of work that doesn't truly add value to their projects.
To help you avoid this spiral and regain peace of mind, here are five tips to always keep in mind when managing a construction site:
1. Align with your project manager on a single source of truth
As a site manager, you always need to maintain an ongoing flow of communication with your project manager to ensure that all issues are logged and resolved as soon as they occur.
WhatsApp notifications, emails and whiteboard notes can create more confusion than solutions when it comes to keeping you connected, because they are not designed to support such delicate and time-sensitive processes. As a result, miscommunication, loss of crucial information, and delayed responses are always just around the corner.
That's why moving your plan to the cloud using a construction-specific tool can add a lot of value. All information is recorded and maintained in one place so that all parties have full visibility on site and can see what happened historically. At the same time, you can send updates, ask questions or escalate issues while browsing the site just using your smartphone.
The project manager will then receive a push notification on their smartphone in real time and act quickly before an issue jeopardizes their daily schedule or their 3-6 week forecast. So you can finally work as a team in the same direction and stop wasting time making calls or sending emails that you're not even sure have been read or not.
2. Stop keeping things in your head and record everything
You have to document everything no matter what. This is the safest way to keep your project and yourself safe from commercial claims. We know how difficult it can be to keep an eye on every detail on site. After all, it is no coincidence that touring the sites is, in most cases, a stressful task.
If you're not equipped with the right tools, you'll have to walk through the field, spot a problem, and document it in detail when you get back to your desk. But sometimes there are too many issues you need to report about. Or for one reason or another, your tour of the site may be interrupted, leaving you wondering if you actually saw it and remembered to record everything.
Needless to say, this can subsequently make your communication with the project manager confusing and frustrating. This is yet another reason why mobile field reporting is so important. It allows you to send critical updates or questions as soon as you find them, just using your smartphone. This way, you can eliminate much of your administrative and mental burden.
At the same time, by documenting everything in a single source of truth, you ensure that your project manager can raise or respond to claims very quickly. You will no longer need to spend weeks or even months finding that email or photo that proves you are not to blame for a delay in your schedule. Everything will be accessible in the cloud and you can access it with a quick search.
3. Make site preparation your number one priority
Typically, when it comes to preparedness, many stakeholders tend to only focus on external events like bad weather.
However, preparation should not start and end there. Most problems that arise on site can be resolved through better anticipation and preparation around orders, delivery, choices, designs and available workforce planning.
We often see problems arise if site work has not been thought through with the relevant parties or if preparation work has been carried out too late, leading to last minute work and errors.
For example, it may happen that site activities are interrupted because prefabricated elements arrive on site too late. If this is the case, it is necessary to bring together all parties involved (engineers, suppliers, etc.) and together find the root cause and solution to the problem so that this does not happen again. This is how you can guarantee a proactive approach in terms of preparing projects and resolving constraints so that unforeseen events do not mean disaster. And that's why, as a construction manager, you always need to be in complete sync with your project manager and the different subcontractors.
4. Involve subcontractors from the beginning
Website running is not a race of individuals but a team sport where system insight and active involvement of all team members is required to ensure that the promises offered are credible.
This is why you should always try to involve subcontractors early in the process when planning your tasks. This way, you can define your needs and understand what to order and when. This approach can save you a lot of stress when it comes to site preparation and delivery of materials.
Furthermore, it will help you increase responsibility as you will plan all future activities together. At this point, the ideal is to record each side's responsibilities and commitments in a shared, live space in the cloud, so that you can avoid the blame game and always know what was done and what wasn't, and deal with constantly evolving challenges.
This is the first step towards creating lasting relationships with your subcontractors. The better you collaborate on a project today, the better your chances of working together again in the future. In an industry that is plagued by a lack of trust and where it is sometimes difficult to find good subcontractors, this is extremely important.
5. Use tools made for construction teams
Many site managers tend to believe that the tools they use are fit for purpose and designed to collaborate with different stakeholders. In many cases, the truth is very different.
Especially when it comes to tools like WhatsApp, Email and Excel that are not designed for construction teams. These tools might be great for other occasions, but they can't help you complete your site tour faster, communicate with your project manager in real time, or document everything in detail while you're on site. And here's why:
- They don’t provide a sharable, on-site “live” view of what’s happening on the ground.
- The data shared through them lacks connection to daily scheduling and short-term planning. This makes it difficult for people to see where things stand overall and which tasks are progressing, what's next, and who is responsible for what.
- Information is dispersed across many different platforms, making the reporting process difficult.
- They don't allow for collaboration between internal and external stakeholders, which makes your effort to connect with the project manager or subcontractors much more challenging.
- They don't allow you to create your website journal as you go. Instead, you should keep all the information in your head until you return to your desk. This creates additional administrative work and stress to remember everything accurately.
- They do not provide detailed reports on the performance of subcontractors on site.
Improve teamwork and gain peace of mind!
It quickly becomes clear that using the wrong tools can really impact the way you manage your website activities on a daily basis. Your teams don't have real-time information about what's coming next and there's no clarity on who is responsible for what leads to bad decisions, costly outages and many sleepless nights for you in your effort to run the site as efficiently as possible .
