Project management

The complaint is almost never the workmanship

Ask people about a building job that went badly and very few of them will describe a wall built out of plumb. They describe not knowing. Nobody came on Tuesday and nobody said why. The tiler was booked before the plumber finished. A cost appeared at the end that nobody had mentioned. Three people had to be told the same thing and none of them told each other.

That is a coordination failure rather than a trade failure, and it is what project management is for. The trades on most jobs are perfectly competent. What decides whether the job is a good experience is whether someone whose job it is to see the whole thing is holding the order, the dates and the money together — and whether that person tells you things before you have to ask.

The most common complaint about contractors is silence. It is also the easiest one to fix, and the one that fixing costs the least.

The most common complaint about contractors is silence.

What is actually being held together

The sequence

Construction is a dependency chain. Nothing can be covered before it is inspected, nothing is tiled before it is waterproofed, and a countertop is templated after cabinets are physically set. Getting the order right is most of the work.

The trades

Most projects involve specialist trades, and the difference is whether someone is holding them to the plan. That coordination is the company's responsibility, not yours.

The permit and the inspections

Filed, booked, and passed at the right points, so the job never has to stop and wait for an inspector it did not call.

The money

Payments tied to stages that are genuinely finished, changes raised in writing before the work, and nothing appearing on a final invoice for the first time.

The decisions you owe

A renovation runs on a stream of choices from the owner, each with a date after which it starts costing time. Those dates belong on the schedule alongside the trades.

The record

Photographs of anything opened up before it closes, the change orders, the inspection sign-offs, and the list at the end. It is what you have if there is ever a question.

How the paperwork runs

1. Scope in writing, with exclusions

   What is included, what is not, named. The excluded page is the one that tells you whether two bids are comparable.

2. A payment schedule tied to stages

   So the money paid and the work done are looking at each other at any point, with a meaningful amount held back until the end.

3. Permits filed, approvals started

   Including anything running on its own calendar — a zoning application, a district review, a septic design — begun early rather than discovered halfway.

4. Changes in writing, before the work

   What changed, why, what it does to the price and what it does to the schedule, agreed by both sides and dated.

5. Inspections at the right points

   Rough-in before anything is covered, final before the space is used. Nothing gets closed until it has been looked at.

6. A walkthrough and a written list

   Room by room, everything that is not right written down, and those items closed before the job is called done.

What you should be able to get at any point

A simple test of whether a job is being managed: ask these four questions on any given week and see whether the answers come back quickly and without hedging.

What is happening this week, and who is on site. What is the next thing waiting on something else, and what is it waiting on. What decisions do you need from me, and by when. Has anything changed since we last spoke — in scope, in cost, or in the date.

If those answers are hard to get, that is the signal, and it usually arrives long before anything goes wrong on site. The right response is not to wait and see; it is to say so, to one person, early. That is what having a single point of contact is for.