Consulting Services
Project Management
Owner side representation on repair, restoration, replacement and fit out work, so that the scope and the schedule survive contact with the contractor and you are left with records you can use.
Why owners lose these projects
On most building projects the owner is the least experienced party in the room. The contractor does this every day. The architect does this every day. The owner does it once every few years, with a team that has other jobs. That asymmetry determines outcomes more than any contract clause does.
It shows up in predictable places. Scope written loosely enough that any interpretation is defensible. Change orders priced without a competitive reference because the work is already underway and switching is not realistic. A schedule where the owner's own approval turnaround is the actual critical path but the delay is attributed elsewhere.
Where we sit
We represent the owner, and only the owner. We hold no relationship with the contractors bidding the work and take nothing from them. This matters more than it sounds. Advice about whether a change order is reasonable is not worth much from someone who has an ongoing commercial interest in the party submitting it.
The work
- Scope definition. Writing the requirement precisely enough that three bidders would price the same job. Most of the value in the entire engagement is created here, before anyone is invited to bid.
- Bid leveling. Putting responses on equivalent terms. Proposals routinely differ in what is included, and the lowest number frequently belongs to the bidder who excluded the most.
- Contract structure. Making sure the payment schedule, retention, change order process and acceptance criteria are agreed while you still have leverage, which is before award and not after.
- Execution oversight. Site observation against the scope, review of change requests with an independent price reference, and schedule tracking that distinguishes contractor delay from owner delay.
- Closeout. As built documentation, warranty registration, commissioning records and updated asset data. Closeout is routinely the weakest phase, and it is the phase whose failures cost you for the next twenty years.
On closeout specifically
The most expensive project failure we encounter is not a cost overrun. It is a completed project that leaves no usable record: equipment installed without model and serial data captured, warranties never registered, control sequences modified during commissioning and never documented. Five years later the building is being maintained on assumptions, and the next assessment has to rediscover, at cost, what was known and then discarded.
Hold enough of the final payment against documented closeout to make the documentation worth producing. If closeout deliverables are not tied to money, they are optional, and optional work at the end of a project does not get done.
Scale
This is most useful on work large enough to matter and small enough that the owner will not hire a full time construction manager. Below that, the overhead is not justified. Above it, you should have dedicated representation, though we are sometimes engaged to review a program that already has it.
Start with the numbers you already have
Send us a recent operating budget, a maintenance log or a vendor contract. We will tell you what it says about the way the site is being run.
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