The construction industry has a major impact on the world’s economy. The overall annual spending on construction is huge. However, even with its extreme importance, the construction productivity rates in many parts of the world have dropped over the years. Reddy Kancharla mentions that one of the biggest reasons for this is the increasingly complex nature of construction projects. For a single construction work to be successfully completed, collaboration between a number of parties is required. This often ends up becoming a huge issue for the workers due to the risks of miscommunication and mismanagement.
Construction projects, especially large scale ones, often go over the budget or off the schedule, causing huge problems for the project manager. Reddy Kancharla mentions that construction delays result in dissatisfied clients, frustrated employees, and even claims against the contractor license. Mr. Kancharla has worked in the construction industry for decades. He has even headed projects in Goldman Sachs, 7 WTC, Reuters, and Bloomberg high-rise buildings in NYC. Hence, owing to his professional experience, he has a good knowledge of the factors causing delays and drops in productivity in construction projects.
To reduce the chances of delays and make the construction process smoother, here are a few expert tips provided by Reddy Kancharla:
- Better planning: A lot of construction efficiency errors are made in the planning stage itself. For example, if a project manager doesn’t properly do the homework on how many cubic yards of concrete they would need for a project, they procure the material in a lesser amount than needed and realize their fault halfway through the project. This will ultimately cause delays and loss in productivity as well. Hence, proper time should be given to the planning stage, so as to identify the exact people, processes, information, equipment, and material needed for the project.
- Use of construction management software: In the contemporary environment, using the latest software and tools available can significantly help people out in their construction work. Proper construction management software can easily aid professionals to keep their work organized, and handle tasks related to bid management, job scheduling, incident reporting, time sheet creation, billing and invoicing, document management and so on.
- Make communication the key: A lot of problems in construction projects crop up due to miscommunication. This issue can be solved by proactively trying to establish a proper communication network between diverse parties. One must try to set up multiple channels of communication for construction projects amongst the management, contractors, subcontractors and related parties, to ensure that all of them work in sync. Setting up regular meetings to ensure things go smoothly between all the team members can prove to be highly advantageous.
Track all changes: As a construction project progresses through its diverse stages, there is a high chance that the contractors shall be required to change a few things. There comes a time when all projects have to be tweaked a little. It is vital to keep track of all these changes.
The pointers mentioned above can be extremely helpful for any construction project manager.