What the Business Pros Know

More Strategies to Know for Reducing Project Costs

July 12, 2024

Vaughn Prost

The last issue covered strategies for reducing costs on projects and this is the continuation of more strategies to benefit owners.

Strategy #5

Pay for a Proper Pre-Design Site Investigation

The Golden Rule of renovation projects should be that for every dollar spent on a pre-design investigation, you will save ten. By removing ceilings, punching holes in the walls to see hidden, existing conditions, etc., pre-design site investigation will help designers base their designs on clear information that is exposed beforehand.

Sean Lundy, president and CEO of MP Lundy Construction and an inaugural member of the Construction Leadership Network, suggests pre-design site investigation be implemented for each project. If you spend $5,000 on site investigations, you’ll save $50,000. Spend $50,000 on a larger job and you’ll save $500,000 or even more, because the risk of site condition change orders goes down significantly. Your project schedule won’t have to go through redesign and rework and that will leave more money in your wallet!

Owners won’t want to fix problems and unforeseen issues at the 11th hour, nor be forced to pay a premium for the extra work, and they don’t want to watch the project schedule get delayed because they chose not to pay for this important step. Smart owners will see that their money is wisely spent on this investigation to ensure it goes smoothly without unforeseen surprises. Vaughn Prost and Prost Builders support this decision to discover hidden issues first and then let designers and architects draw the plans with full knowledge of the problems before they start designing.

Strategy #6

Hire a CM Who Practices Visual Planning

This is a system developed by Glenn Ballard, with Gregory Howell as a principal collaborator, called “The Last Planner” from the Lean Construction Institute. This system was a way to develop and disseminate knowledge regarding the management of work in projects, due to the realization that across all American and Canadian construction sites-only 54 percent of planned tasks were being accomplished in a week’s time under traditional project planning.

This bad statistic is the result of not utilizing visual planning, which leads to projects taking much longer to complete than originally planned. According to the Lean Construction Institute, the activity focus of traditional project management and controls overlooked the causes and consequences of an unpredictable workflow. But with the use of visual planning, using planning boards mounted on a wall for all to see will engage the builder and all trades in a realistic conversation about timing, sequencing, and constraints. This work drives much higher timeline predictability, since trades that are given a voice at the planning table are much more likely to keep their commitments to the project timeline.

For many decades, the general contractors decided on schedule logic and timelines by imposing force on the trades, but by incorporating visual planning into a project-the result would be a schedule that stays on track and finishes on schedule.

Vaughn Prost is the owner and president of Prost Builders lnc., a design/build and construction services firm located in Columbia. Vaughn has over forty years of domestic and international design and construction experience as a cost and scheduling engineer, structural engineer, owner’s construction representative, and general contractor.