CHAPTER 5:
Explore the Cost-Savings Benefit of Staff Support
Any construction project, regardless of size or scope, can be a daunting undertaking for a municipality already busy with its typical day-to-day business.
From concept to completion, even small construction projects can take months to complete and carry unknown risks. Larger capital improvement projects can tax your staff for years.
If your municipal staff lacks experience in construction oversight, your team may soon find itself overwhelmed by monitoring the progress of the project and ensuring compliance with grant requirements. Fortunately, you can fill in these skill sets and support your staff while keeping your construction project on budget.
An honest assessment of your staff's capabilities early in your project planning will give your organization time to either build up staffing or identify a consulting partner.
While project phasing is typically considered early in the design phase, you can realize additional benefits by involving a construction engineer in this process.
Identify utility locations early
Despite being a necessary part of virtually every construction job, utility coordination is an all-too-common delay. If not implemented early enough, coordination conflicts can lead to months of delays and quickly derail a project schedule.
Project teams may find themselves working around a delay of six months or more with costly redesigns meant to eliminate the utility conflict. And this solution is possible only if the utility infrastructure is moving a few inches away. Further moves can create problems for other portions of the project.
When utility issues are identified early enough in the construction phase, contractors can resequence project phases as needed. By building other portions of the project first, contractors can buy utilities time to relocate infrastructure and keep progress going on the project.
However, the best way to avoid this problem altogether is to address utility coordination during the design phase. This is the most effective way to identify utilities that will need relocation without creating a delay during construction. By moving utility coordination to the design phase, utilities gain time to put coordination on their schedule. Agencies can wait to solicit contractor bids on the project until it’s confirmed that the utilities are out of the way.
In some cases, it may also be useful to have a subsurface utility exploration (SUE) process in place early in the design phase as well. The ability to do subsurface exploration verifies that no new utilities have gone in even after design phase utility coordination. It’s a useful tool for determining the exact location of the utility. Involving a construction professional in the utility identification process can help to define exactly what “out of the way” means.
Secure permits in advance
Permitting is another part of every construction process that somehow still manages to lead to schedule delays because some permits can be more challenging to obtain than others. For example, it can take six months to a year to process an Army Corps of Engineers or railroad right of entry permit. Until you’ve dealt with this process once, you may not recognize the potential delay you’re facing until it’s too late.
Project teams should obtain permits as early as possible. In many cases, you can identify which permits will be required as early as the design phase. In other instances, you may be required to provide more detailed engineering or construction plans for how the work will be done. For these more detailed permits, having these documents as complete as possible is critical, so that the application process is not inadvertently doubled when the permit office reports that information is missing. These delays can mean starting the entire process all over again.
Working with an experienced construction engineering and inspection firm knowledgeable in a range of permitting requirements can give public agencies and municipalities an edge in construction efficiency.
Consider traffic control options
Project phasing presents an often-untapped opportunity to improve construction efficiency. While project phasing is typically considered early in the design phase, you can realize additional benefits by involving a construction engineer in this process. These experts can leverage their unique perspective for maintenance of traffic staging and identify areas where it might make sense to work on multiple stages at the same time, combine several smaller stages into one, or work in a different sequence to keep the project on schedule. Your construction engineer might also be better equipped to factor in the type of equipment and manpower available to improve staging sequences.
Each of these simple solutions can mean significant cost savings for a project. By taking a proactive approach to mitigating these potential conflicts, municipalities can ensure they adhere to project schedules.
