HAMILTON ANDERSON ARCHITECTS - PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Today, we're gonna talk about technical and quality reviews based from the project manager's perspective on a variety of projects, ranging in scale from one consultant and one architect to large project teams of almost 10 people, which is what I consider a large project team in the hospitality sector.

At the same time that our consultants are working on their proposals for the scope, we also work on a plan internally. We assign personnel types to projects, we assign budget numbers to them, and then-this plan is based on a work service list, as opposed to a lump sum or construction cost estimate work schedule. And so what we've done is, we've listed out the phases of the project, their duration, and then the hours associated with each type of person to complete the task.

A lot of them have to do with the personnel that's available in the office at the time to execute the project. The other factors have to do with budget restrictions on the project, and again, your largest thing is choosing the right person to get the project done and to fulfill the deliverable. There are some situations where you have someone in the office who is better suited to the type of project, but they may not be available.

To check and make sure that that works and that you can actually use a percentage based construction cost proposal we also complete a work plan. This one is similar to the service work plan. It breaks up the project into different phases.

After you've negotiated and worked through your deliverable schedule with the client, of course at that point you wanna have talked to all your team members and looked at kind of your projected resources to make sure that you can deliver a project as promised to the client. But then you also move into internal processes and delivery. So on larger projects with multiple team members, I like to do a schedule that lists out the deliverables that we've promised the client.

Depending on the background of the client, the owner may provide us with their own contract. When we get the first round in, a lot of times the fee has already been included. The scope of services has already been included, and incorporated from our proposal that we sent them.

So construction budgets are really interesting, because if it's a developer a lot of times they come with a construction budget to us. And we then work around it to develop a fee that meets the requirements to financially fund the project. If not, we can do estimates based on what we know about the current market.

You know, another thing that could happen is, you could be redoing one room and then someones like, "Well, we can't redo that one room "without also redoing the entry." So you end up taking on this little space that ultimately has a large impact on what you are doing.

So, that's one thing that I really like that we so early on, to facilitate the design of a project. It's also a good check for everyone. Everyone in the office gets to come by and see it and make sure that it's in our line of thinking, for our design vision here.