The AEC industry loves to talk about mitigating risk on their projects. Owners, Architects and Contractors are all looking for ways to mitigate risk. Unfortunately all too often the risk is not being mitigated, it is simply being passed along to another party to handle. Owners pass it to the Designers and Contractors. Designers and Contractors add cost to the risk and pass much of it along the way to subs who then add more cost. All this adds up to substantially more expensive projects for the Owner and the risk has simply been rolled down the proverbial hill. When people talk about mitigating risk they should be evaluating ways to reduce it and not pass it along. Risk reduction should start at the very beginning of a project when the project is first mentioned. One of the biggest risks that owners can mitigate is information miss management. No one thinks about managing information in the early stages of a project when that first memo is written, but this is the most critical point of a project. All too often we hear from prospects that they already have so much information in file cabinets and binders they think it is too late to introduce a project management application into the mix. Hindsight is 2020. The senior VP of a large Engineering firm told me at a conference several weeks ago “we are great at generating large volumes of information in this industry but very poor at managing that information.” Combine the ability to generate large volumes of information, with long duration projects, involving potentially hundreds or even thousands of participants and you have a tremendous risk that could be easily mitigated from the start with the correct project management software.
Eric

With bid prices dropping like the stock market, facility owners and CM firms needs to step up their project controls procedures. Contractors will be looking for every small change or delay as cause for a change order as their profit margins are evaporating from the bidding process. To prevent these potential change orders owners and their CM’s will need to make sure every RFI, Submittal and Change order is carefully reviewed and responded to. The traditional approach would be to higher more staff or consultants to oversee these projects and ensure contract compliance. With today’s economy crimping clients budgets there is no room for the expense of additional project personnel to push paper around the office. The smart owner and their cm firm will need to look toward technology to reduce project staffing requirements increase accountability and reduce project risk. Engineers are great at reviewing submittals for contract compliance but a good collaborative project management application eliminates the need for them to waste time and money pushing paper or manually logging information into outdated software. Collaborative applications bring the entire team together so they can efficiently share project information and ensure projects are completed on time, within budget for a lower cost.