Saturday,
REMINDER: all these blogs' references to construction manager are to the particular form of construction management services being used on public school building construction in which the work of the project is bid by “work packages” directly to the school district.
If the school district has done its homework and bid its construction project to a general contractor, it has signed a contract and its design team will oversee the project as part of its fee... Work begins with the general contractor doing all preliminary steps, including writing subcontracts, compiling shop drawings and material submittals, installing its project superintendent on site, and making all necessary preparation of the site such as utilities, access roads and gates, fencing and other construction barriers, construction waste disposal, safety barriers, and other items that precede actual work. The general contractor will prepare a firm schedule of work based on his plan to complete the project during established time frame. He will have analyzed the work and determined where and when he needs each subcontractor's forces. He will then keep the subcontractors aware of and committed to the schedule for all phases of the work. If a subcontractor fails to supply workers on time, or make errors in his work, the general contractor will have procedures for dealing with it. Questions that arise during construction will be directly through the contractor, then to the design team. Only if there are extra costs or non-construction questions do questions have to be handled by the school district.
When the school district has employed a construction manager, someone will have to determine whose responsibility each of the preliminary site preparations belong to. In some cases, the construction manager may have a contract with the school board that calls these items "reimbursables." The school district will not know in advance what the cost for these items will be. The CM might hire an outside firm to provide these services, might do them with its own or related forces (though this violates the state law it is difficult to prove), or might have included some of these items in the "work packages." If in the work packages, there is often conflict between the subcontractors as to who is responsible for which portions, and the CM tends to log and accumulate extra charges as the project proceeds. Subcontractors do not like to get charged for someone else's trash cleanup or utility usage, so these issues often come back to the school district at the end of the job when final payment is due. Subcontractors who feel they have been taken advantage of by the CM will not bid again. The only thing that usually avoids legal action in these cases is that the amounts are small.
More on building under a CM later.
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