Ashwin Khubchandani on Construction Management Services and its Relevance

There are various types of construction projects ranging from houses to apartments and commercial constructions. Different projects have different objectives and demand several types of labor and materials to accomplish these projects. So, construction is a complicated process altogether that demands a high level of precision, quality, and coordination of various related tasks.

Construction management services offer the project owners effective professional services for managing the schedules, quality, cost, scope, safety, and overall function of construction projects. A skilled construction management service will be compatible with the delivery methods of various specialized construction projects. No matter what the setting of the project is, a good construction manager or CM will take responsibility to accomplish the project successfully by tackling various incurred challenges in it.

Ashwin Khubchandani explains that fundamentally a construction project consists of three parties: 

• The project owner who commissions the construction project. This is the party who funds it and to whom the project should be delivered on completion.
• The architect or design engineer/s who designs various aspects of the project, including the floor plan to engineering elements like mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP).
• The contractor or contracting firm oversees the daily operations of the construction projects and manages all the subcontractors.

In this setting, the construction managers act on behalf of the project owner’s interest and offer proper administration and oversight of the entire project. The CM works with all the involved parties internally and externally to keep the project on the right track, meet the deadlines, stick to the budget, deliver the expected quality standards, define and ensure the scope and function of the project, etc. Having a trusted and knowledgeable construction management service in place is a big relief to the new or ignorant project owners to ensure that the other parties involved are not taking advantage of their ignorance in the technical aspects of construction projects.

What are CMs?

Construction Managers are highly qualified professionals who possess academic qualifications and a high level of experience working with various project owners, contractors, architects, and other construction experts. They will be able to oversee the needs of a project and work closely with the owners to understand their objectives and desires. They will also take care of the regulatory and safety compliance needs by possessing in-depth knowledge of the same. This will help the primary project owners to manage the risks well and avoid any unforeseen consequences by being ignorant and noncompliant.

A study done by McGraw-Hill, which was supported by the CMAA Foundation a couple of years ago, showed that usage of professional construction management services significantly improved the objectives of cost-cutting and helped to avoid mitigated problems to produce high-quality results in various projects compared to those which did not use the CM services. 

So, choosing professional CMs with relevant skills and industry experience is the most desirable thing to the project owners. Ashwin Khubchandani suggests that you need to be very careful and do enough research to choose the best construction management services for your project. Check for their knowledge and expertise in various fields of construction management as cost, schedule, quality, safety, function, and scope.