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A site manager is one of the central gears of every construction project. You are busy from the time you arrive at work in the morning until you leave at the end of the day, often fighting fires and frantically calling subcontractors or the project manager to get or relay information. Let alone the time spent trying to ensure that all issues are fully documented, nobody arrives on site in vain and that material orders don鈥檛 get late, misplaced, or even worse damaged.

Free ebook:聽Why WhatsApp and Excel aren鈥檛 enough for running complex construction projects

No two days are the same, but one thing is certain. You shouldn鈥檛 have to continuously reinvent the way you communicate with your project manager about your site tours and the things you see on the field.

How many times have you sent an important email or message back to the office without receiving a reply? And what effect did that lack of response have on the progress of your project?

It鈥檚 no surprise, then, that many site managers constantly feel overwhelmed and stressed because they try to balance different dependencies, resolve constraints and at the same time align around milestones both with their project manager and the subcontractors that are participating in the project. As a result, they often end up buried under a mountain of work that doesn鈥檛 truly add value to their projects.

To help you avoid ending up in this spiral and gain back your peace of mind, here are five tips you should always keep in mind when you run a construction site:

1. Align with your project manager in a single source of truth

As a site manager, you always need to maintain a seamless communication flow with your project manager to ensure that all problems are recorded and addressed as soon as they occur.

WhatsApp notifications, emails, and whiteboard notes can generate more confusion than solutions when it comes to keeping you connected because they are not designed to support such delicate and time-sensitive processes. As a result, miscommunication, loss of crucial information and delayed responses are always around the corner.

This is why moving your plan in the cloud using a construction-specific tool can bring a lot of value. All information is recorded and kept in one place so that all sides have full visibility on site and can see what happened historically. At the same time, you can send updates, ask questions or escalate problems as you walk around the site just by using your smartphone.

The project manager will then receive a push notification on their smartphone in real time and act fast before an issue puts your daily schedule or your 3-6 week lookahead in danger. Like that, you can finally work as one team facing the same direction and stop wasting time on making phone calls or sending out emails that you are not even sure whether they have been read or not.

2. Stop keeping things in your head and record everything

You have to document everything no matter what. This is the safest way to keep your project and yourself protected from commercial claims. We know well how tough it can be to keep an eye on every single detail on site. It is no coincidence, after all, that site tours are in most cases a stressful task.

If you are not equipped with the right tools, you have to walk around the field, detect a problem and then make sure to document it in detail once you are back at your desk. But sometimes, there are simply too many issues you need to report on. Or for one or the other reason your site tour might be interrupted leaving you there wondering whether you have actually seen and remembered to record everything.

Needless to say that this can subsequently make your communication with the project manager confusing and frustrating. This is one more reason why mobile field reporting is so important. It enables you to submit updates or critical questions as soon as you stumble upon them just by using your smartphone. Like that, you can eliminate a great deal of your admin and mental burden.

At the same time, by documenting everything on a single source of truth you ensure that your project manager can raise or respond to claims very quickly. You will no longer have to spend weeks or even months to find that one email or photo that proves you are not the one to blame for a schedule delay. Everything will be accessible to the cloud and you will be in a position to access it with a quick search.

3. Make site preparation your number one priority

Typically, when it comes to preparation many stakeholders tend to focus only on external events such as bad weather.

However, preparation should not start and finish there. Most of the problems that emerge on site can be solved through better anticipation and preparation around orders, delivery, choices, drawings, and planning of the available workforce.

Read also: 5 questions all Project Managers should ask themselves before they start a project

Usually, we see that problems arise if work on site has not been thought through with relevant parties or preparation work has been realised too late leading to last-minute work and mistakes.

For instance, it could be that there is an interruption of site activities because prefab elements arrive on site too late. If that鈥檚 the case, you need to gather all the involved parties (engineers, suppliers, etc.) and together find the root cause and solution to the problem so that it won鈥檛 happen again. This is how you can ensure a proactive approach in terms of project preparation and constraint resolution so that unforeseen events aren鈥檛 synonymous with disaster. And this is why, as a site manager, you need to be in full sync with your project manager and the different subcontractors at all times.

4. Involve subcontractors early on

Site execution isn鈥檛 a race of individuals but a team sport where a system view and active engagement from all team members is required to ensure that the offered promises are reliable.

That鈥檚 why you should always try to involve subcontractors early on in the process when planning their tasks. In that way, you can define their needs and get a good understanding of what to order and when. Such an approach can save you from a lot of stress when it comes to site preparation and material deliveries.

Learn more: 3 steps for building a strong culture around planning

Furthermore, it will help you increase accountability as you will plan all upcoming activities together. At this point, you should ideally record the responsibilities and commitments of each side in a live, shared space in the cloud so that you can avoid the blame game and always know what鈥檚 done and what isn鈥檛, and deal with evolving challenges.

This is the first step towards the creation of long-lasting relationships with your subcontractors. The better you collaborate on a project today, the higher the chances that you get to work together again in the future. In an industry that is hit by lack of trust and where good subcontractors are sometimes hard to find, that is extremely important.

5. Use tools that are made for construction teams

Many site managers tend to believe that the tools they are using are fit for purpose and made to collaborate with the different stakeholders. In many cases, the truth is way different.

Especially when it comes to tools like WhatsApp, Email, and Excel that are not built for construction teams. Such tools might be great for other occasions but they can鈥檛 help you with completing your site tour faster, communicating with your project manager in real time, or with documenting everything in detail while on site. And here is why:

• They don鈥檛 provide a shareable, onsite 鈥渓ive鈥� view of what鈥檚 happening on site.
• The data shared through them lacks the connection to the daily schedule and short-term planning. This makes it hard for people to see where things are overall and what tasks are progressing, what鈥檚 coming next, and who has ownership of what.
• Information is dispersed on many different platforms hindering the reporting process.
• They don鈥檛 enable collaboration between internal and external stakeholders which makes your effort to connect with the project manager or the subcontractors way more challenging.
• They don鈥檛 allow you to create your site diary, as you go. Instead, you have to keep all information in your head until you are back at your desk. That generates both additional admin work and stress to remember everything with precision.
• They don鈥檛 provide detailed reports on the performance of subcontractors on site.

Improve teamwork and gain peace of mind!

It quickly becomes clear that using the wrong tools can really impact the way you manage site activities on a daily basis. Your teams have no real-time insight into what鈥檚 coming next and there is no clarity on who鈥檚 accountable for what leading to poor decisions, costly interruptions, and many sleepless nights for you in your effort to run the site as efficiently as possible.

If you want to learn more about how you can break this circle and get everyone working better together, download our free ebook here!