Many clients who commission construction projects don’t know how to get the most out of their partnership with the engineering company and end up wasting time, spending money unnecessarily and fraying their nerves. Paavo Pärn, a member of the management board of Sirkel & Mall, says that a basic background check, an understanding of how engineering companies work and the ability to ask the right questions can help a client save as much as 10% on construction costs. How then do you avoid a situation where mistakes made by an inexperienced engineer have to be fixed in the course of construction, costs have gotten completely out of hand and the project manager is no longer returning your calls?
In choosing an engineering company to work with, the first thing you need to do is run a background check. Annual reports are freely available online: casting an eye over a company’s finances will tell you whether they are reliable. Are they in profit? Is their turnover on the rise? Are they paying their workers proper salaries? “If a company is consistently in the black, it shows that its structure and processes are all in place,” Pärn says.
Look for testimonials and talk to the past and present clients of a company as well. “Find out who their main clients are,” Pärn recommends. “Are they happy with the company? People often want to get the design phase over and done with as quickly as possible to make a start on building. But the design phase itself, if done right, can bring the price of construction down by a good 10%. Rush into it and it’s likely to cost you a lot more.”
Something else worth investigating is whether the lead architect and lead engineer have been working for the company for a long time or whether there is a high degree of turnover in the roles. This information is easy to find on LinkedIn. If employees come and go in a company on a regular basis, this may be a sign of internal issues. “It can indicate that the company just uses the people it hires, sucking them dry and discarding them before doing the same to the next person,” Pärn warns. “If staff are constantly overworked or underpaid, it doesn’t bode well for the results should you choose to partner with them.”
Sometimes engineering companies will enter into a contract with a client and only then put a team together from whoever is available at the time. “You might be introduced to someone at a meeting with the company’s reps who ends up contributing nothing to your project,” Pärn says. “Once you’ve signed on the dotted line, your commission is simply handed to another team.”
As such, it pays to ask before signing the contract whether the people at the meeting are the same ones who will be working on the project. There is nothing wrong with delegating in and of itself, but the client has the right to know who exactly will be working on their project.
The key players are the lead engineer and the project manager, who is also the first point of contact for the client. But who is the architect? Who is the engineer? Who will be responsible for heating and ventilation? Who will be taking charge of water and sewerage? Have they worked on similar projects before, and if so, how much experience do they have? “Dig into their background and ask the company about the work they’ve already done,” Pärn urges. “Clients have every right to do this.”
One way in which clients typically shoot themselves in the foot is by presenting the engineering company with a brief whose framework is far too narrow. “It’s the engineer’s job to draw up a detailed brief,” Pärn says. “The client’s role is to set out their needs; the engineer does the rest. Think of it like a doctor’s appointment: the patient describes their symptoms to the doctor, who then diagnoses the problem and decides on the appropriate course of treatment – not doing whatever the patient thinks is best.”
To make the most of an engineering company’s experience and know-how, the client should come to the table with an open mind, setting out their needs, wishes and expectations. The team working on the project can then offer suitable solutions to achieve the best possible result while optimising costs.
The engineer’s role is to point out what the norm is in terms of solutions and why they are offering a different solution. Are the project manager and lead engineer capable of explaining why every detail of the solution they have come up with is the way it is? Which are linked to form and function? Which are more to do with aesthetics? Why is the solution in question the best one for the client? Pärn believes in there being a ‘one and only’ building for every piece of land. “You work out what that building is by eliminating all the less suitable variants,” he says.
Take the choice of walls as a simple example: depending on the material, it could add to the space in the building or take away from it. “There’s a big difference in external walls between concrete elements that are 460 mm thick and timber-frame walls that are 350 mm thick in terms of the amount of usable – and therefore sellable – space the building will actually have in it,” Pärn notes. For instance, in the case of a four-storey apartment building with a surface area of 600 m² the difference is as much as 44 m², which equates to ca 150,000 euros. The principal plans for such an apartment building would cost about the same.
Construction prices are changing rapidly, so the choice of materials and solutions is crucial.
“Are you aware how much the team talks to construction companies and whether they’re up to speed on modern building techniques?” Pärn asks. “Does the engineer know how much the solution they’re offering will cost, and are they capable of coming up with an optimised project that can be completed to a reasonable cost? Sometimes reinforced concrete is cheaper, at other times steel is. The prices go up and down. What’s important is that the engineer is cognisant of those differences. These are things that clients tend not to ask about, but they could and arguably should.”
If a team constantly keeps one eye on the cost of construction and materials, the client can be sure that the construction phase is unlikely to spring any major surprises.
Are there any ‘non-jobs’ that engineering companies try to sell to clients simply to earn themselves more? “Not just to make a fast buck, no,” says Pärn. “Not directly, anyway. But there’s always the risk of taking the path of least resistance. Money matters are dealt with by the company; the work itself is done by the engineers. Even engineering companies find it hard to motivate salaried engineers to put more into their work and come up with solutions and do it all more quickly.” And although EVS lists tasks and the stages in which they are done, this outline remains general enough for less elaborate projects to still fit the bill.
“This is where how smart the client is comes into play as well,” says Pärn. “An experienced client won’t order draft plans, preliminary plans, principal plans and working plans, but specific activities and specific plans.” What kinds of plans a client wants needs to be described in detail.
Pärn also recommends thinking about insurance. “If I was a client with a building of critical importance, I’d have it insured separately,” he says. “I wouldn’t just rely on the general insurance the engineering company has. With big insurers, one-off cover can cost you 5000 euros or so. But if you need to claim on it, your case will be handled more quickly and in more depth than if you were just relying on the general insurance covering all of the sites the engineering company’s working on.”
The right choice of engineering company will ensure that the lead engineer provides support during every stage of a project. “The team won’t be focussed on just getting the thing done, but will want to be a proper partner and consultant to you,” Pärn says. “A good team is your partner in the drafting and designing stages as well as during construction, and is capable of dealing with changes and corrections in the project.”
The client, for their part, must give the team enough time to take a step back if they need to do so: too much pressure regarding deadlines can lead to changes that would improve the final solution going unmade. Every building is unique in terms of its nuances, and it is a lot to expect the engineer to foresee all of them.
Every project must have a project manager: not even the strongest team is capable of doing its best on a project without overall coordination. Like an orchestra needs a conductor, so a team needs a project manager. “We’ve learned this the hard way ourselves,” Pärn admits. “We’ve attempted smaller projects without a project manager before, and few of them ended well. As soon as there are more than two people on a team, they need managing. These days, even projects for the simplest private homes sometimes involve as many as 14 specialists.”
Pärn adds that clients who have never requested a project manager because they think they can fulfil the role themselves and that it will save them money are mostly doomed to fail. “They simply underestimate the importance of the job the project manager does and don’t realise the benefits it brings,” he says.
In summary, it can be said that insufficient preliminary work, too much rushing and a desire to save money where it ought to be spent can mess with a project’s budget and deadlines alike.