Recovering from a bad building project?

Recovering from a bad building project?

In the last week been asked to take over a couple of jobs that have got into difficulties.

I am not sure if two projects in two weeks equals a trend. But it has set us thinking about how we tackle these tricky situations. In the first situation the builder has gone bust whilst in the second he has been removed from site. Both cause stress and anxiety for the clients. In turn causing delays and increased costs.

Everyone loses

There are likely to be a number of people who are feeling sore about the situation. The client, the builder and the subcontractors to name the most obvious.

We need to create enough space for us to work without taking on any antagonism from existing parties nor taking on any saviour status as the fresh face.

What can we do

We try to focus back on what is to be achieved. What is the budget for doing it and what time was is supposed to be done for.

Hopefully this rational approach to focusing on the job in hand and getting a plan of action together is reassuring.

Inevitably there are inefficiencies that come with a change of contractor.

It is quite likely that we will have to spend time redrawing a scope of work. This can go over what remains to be done. Make plans on deciding who is to do it and the prices for doing it.  We will need to check contracts. Whilst we will probably not get involved in any remaining wrangles we will have to check that there are no obstacles to continuing the work. Finally we then have to contact the existing subcontractors and decide who is willing to continue and assess whether this is a good idea.

Are there financial problems

There are probably cash flow issues between the builder and the subcontractor. These may colour the ‘subbies’ inclination to continue. We will also have to decide if the quality of the work is sufficient to want us to encourage the subcontractor to continue.  Where there is a change on tradesman there will be an inefficiency in the new person determining what existing work they can rely on. This is most apparent for trades like electrics and plumbing.

Who knows what the cause of the difficulties were. It’s not really relevant for us to explore it.  We do need to make sure that there are no issues that will affect the on-going construction.

Scope of works

Once we have completed a scope of work, we will pin a cost estimate to each item in order to check the budget against available resources.  We will also use this scope to produce a programme to check against the anticipated completion date and use it to check against the construction information available in order to determine if there are any areas of uncertainty that might need additional architect or client input.

This almost amounts to a:

Phase I – get control measures in place to determine what you are trying to do and how you plan to do it before you proceed to a…

Phase II of restarting work.  This time inefficiency is frustrating particularly to clients but is well worth it in the end as a continually evolving situation is not helpful to anyone and was probably part of the previous regime’s final characteristics.

I am not sure how sympathetic this approach sounds but I guess we see our role as being more non-judgemental and more goal orientated and hope that this slightly dispassionate approach helps us get out of the client’s hair as quickly as possible and allows them to put a painful episode behind them. We would like to think we can help clients with recovering from a bad building project, and make things much better.