CONSTRUCTION MANAGER SKILLS – 5,6

5. When communicating with other participants in a construction project, manifest tasks and solutions concisely and clearly.

     

 Communication between stakeholders of construction project cannot and should not be limited to meetings and online communications. One of the most important parts to submit questions for discussion in meeting is to make up them in a clear way. Before each meeting, it is necessary to send a list of questions to be discussed, to each of the participants in a day or two, to enable them to prepare answers or additional questions. During the course of the meeting, a competent person should conduct minutes so that after the end it will be possible to understand the essence of the proposed solutions and to draw out a relevant summary of the meeting.

The best time to process and summarize the abstract is immediately after the end, since the memory has the trait to distort the information as times go by. So, head of meeting has to do his best in order to complete summary, although it’s not always possible. After processing, it is necessary to distribute a summary to the participants for confirmation and signing. The more concisely and simple the decisions on topical issues will be displayed, the easier it will be to put them into practice during the process of managing a construction project. In addition to administering the meetings, there is always a need for clarification or confirmation on issues affecting the interests of two parties, for example, after a telephone conversation. Naturally, with a concise and unambiguous statement of the question, there are more chances to expect an equally unambiguous answer, which in turn will save time for all stakeholders.

6. Timely issue responsible decisions on matters requiring clarity.

Just as a construction project manager has questions for the contractor, the architects and the customer, the flow of questions from subordinates is no less. Moreover, suppliers and subcontractors produce the much more amount of questions. All questions should be included in a special list with the date of receipt, from whom it was received, to which section of the construction project the question relates, decision time, the essence of the decision or answer. The list is compiled in Excel format, what makes it easy to sort them. The most appropriate solution

in order to cope with sometimes enormous amount of RFI - Requests For Information will be to put in charge the experienced manager, who is well acquainted with entire construction process, able to solve by himself routine issues that make up most of the correspondence and promptly respond to an important question that requires an immediate response from the construction project manager or clarification from another member of the project team.